


Diving into the Wreck

by Anonymississippi



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Action/Adventure, F/F, mermaid!au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-11 02:51:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 45,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7873300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymississippi/pseuds/Anonymississippi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the sea is another story<br/>the sea is not a question of power</p>
<p>Kara Zor-El was given up to the land at the age of twelve when the tribes faced a threat they could no longer combat. After another dozen years and a scolding from her marine biologist sister, Kara has returned to the oceans as Supergirl. But soon the past will resurface, and along with it, the monster that broke up her family. Can the few remaining Merfolk work with the humans to keep their fragile family together, or will all be lost to the power of the deep?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> it's very gay and very aquatic and very plot i blame you lampy
> 
> title taken from Adrienne Rich poem of the same name

 

 

 

_The Leviathan is not of this planet._

_The Leviathan is myth, in the strictest sense, a creature of such immensity that its gargantuan tail could brush the Earth’s molten core and emerge whole, warmed, like a hound nestled near the fireside. Some scientists claim we know more of the vast solar system above than we do of the mysterious depths below; where creatures like the Leviathan are rumored to rest, lying in wait, until such a time as to emerge with a roar to deafen all ears, to create ripples so large continents should fear the expansive clutches of the sea._

_Geologists claim that earthquakes devastate the land beneath our feet. They never consider the Leviathan rising._

_The Earth is seventy percent water, or so the children learn in early schooling. In majorities there is power, so why do humans disregard the sea? Salty, fathomless, unknown and dark, those waters hold secrets the likes of which humanity would be lucky to suspect. Whole colonies thrive and flourish where eyes and instruments dare not dive, where damages are not catalogued or recorded for study, where tattered myths evaporate and are forgotten._

_The Leviathan is myth, for it is not of this planet._

_We fear the elements unexplained, and consign to fable or fairy story those inexplicable characters that would do us harm._

_The Leviathan is not of this planet, but it certainly exists. It exists in the same way that all monsters do, in legends where heroes fight and prevail. Perhaps all we ever needed to transport the storied monsters from the realms of fable to a stark reality were heroes to combat them._

_The Leviathan is not of this planet._

_Neither, so the legends go, are the merfolk._

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

When she and Kara breach the surface, her gills begin to quiver.

It is colder than Alura suspected above the comforting darkness of the water. In this shrill and chill _night_ , a strange division of time created by the humans, she waits. The Oracle’s eye is opened fully, all-seeing, whiter than the bleached shells she and Astra collected in their youth before the wars, before the attacks—before the destruction of all they knew.

“Mother,” Kara gasps, straining her neck to the side. If Kara is experiencing half the discomfort Alura feels seizing the tendons of her throat, she wonders if the ocean water will be the only flowing salt this _night_. “It h-hurts.”

“It will pass,” Alura assures her, pulling Kara into her as they bob with the waves of the open ocean, the rise and fall far more wild this close to the surface winds. A gaseous cloud passes over the Oracle’s tide-shifting eye, darkening the water around them. Their own eyes glow as they do in the deep, the piercing beams of light stirred to burning brightness without the Oracle shining above them.

“I’m frightened,” Kara cries softly, her chest hitching, her tail—long and slender, cerulean and royal, with iridescent scales of periwinkle and sapphire that Alura loved beyond all else the moment Kara arrived—that strong tail curls beneath Kara as she shivers, cowering in the shadow of the small dingy Alura stole from the nearest human settlement.

“You must be brave, Kara,” Alura tells her.

“Astra was brave,” Kara answers, sniffling against the waves.

It should not hurt this bad, a verbal blow from her daughter. But it makes Alura wonder if she’s strong enough to do this. As strong as her sister had been, staring down the leaders of the tribal council, defying even the Oracle herself.

Kara regards the _boat_ floating near them with utter contempt.

“But the other tribes are gone! If Aunt Astra really defeated the L—”

“Do not speak its name, Kara.”

“But it’s gone, too. Astra’s harpoon—”

“Your aunt is a skilled warrior, Kara, but skill and bravery, while suitable for fierce battle, are not the chosen weapons against an aging, stubborn council. That is my realm. You aunt dared defy them against my urgings… and the councilors punished her for it,” Alura says, carefully leaving off her compliance in the sentencing. She cannot have Kara think even less of her this night, after she must do her worst. “There is truth to what Astra says, and if we do not act, I fear we will be hunted to extinction.”

“Mother…” Kara asks, clumsy, clutching fingernails scratching at her morphing neck. The gills sew themselves shut, her chest expanding in cumbersome movements. “Will the beast return?”

“Yes,” Alura says, though she dare not frighten Kara with her suspicions. “That is why you must go, Kara, why Astra was… She has been…” _silenced,_ Alura thinks, forevermore, unless Alura can reverse the decision, can swim further than she ever has, unless the Oracle will graciously guide her toward her obstinate, intrepid sister in that frigid prison—the prison for monsters and demons where the council had sentenced Astra for speaking out. That same council had forced Alura’s hand, had demanded Alura pass judgment against Astra, all for a paralyzing fear of the truth. “Astra has been detained, and the negotiations halted for her outbursts.”

“But mother,” Kara continues. “Why must I go?”

“Because Astra is right, Kara,” Alura pulls her daughter close, kisses the smooth, youthful white skin of her cheek. “Your father and Jor-El know that we cannot keep the next generation safe if the beast still wanders. And Astra herself would want this… to keep you safe.”

“But Astra killed—”

“A myth of such power cannot be overthrown so easily, Kara, as much as the council might wish it so. It is only contained, as Astra is now,” Alura corrects her. “But Lara and I are of the same mind. She has secured passage for Kal-El on this tide.”

“Mother!”

Kara clings and Alura doubts, she doubts so deeply her fear dries her out and shrivels her to nothing.

How can she do this? How can she cast off her only daughter to a violent _land_ of which she knows so little; how can she ask Kara to care for a child when she cannot even care for Kara? What will the council think upon her return, when she and Lara both have defied their orders of racial preservation, and instead opted to save the lives of their children by sacrificing them to shore? No matter the civil distress, they will most certainly die if Astra is correct. Yet Alura believes her sister, loves her dearly, loves her enough to defy them all, to save Kara, to place this burden upon her young, shaking shoulders.

“You and I must be brave, Kara. The war is not yet won,” Alura says. “Come, into the boat.”

“Mother, please…”

“I will stay with you for the change, but we must hurry. The Oracle foresaw great things for you, Kara.”

Kara clambers over the lip of the contraption as the drifting shadows move from the Oracle’s eye once again. Kara whimpers and Alura knows that pain, wishes she could bear it for Kara as she has borne much else. She has experienced this change before, but Kara’s first time will register as shock; she looks down at a tail spit into two limbs, kinked and ossified, inflexible, the beautiful sheen of protective scale flaked away to useless padding. _Skin_ where armor should glimmer under the Oracle’s eye.

“M-m-mother,” Kara stutters, running her fingers over her new body. “They—”

“They’re called _legs_ , Kara,” Alura tells her comfortingly. “You will learn to use them, and they will be as natural to you as your tail once you make your way on land.”

“I don’t want to leave you,” Kara says, her chin wobbling over the edge of the boat, her hair shimmering like golden coins in the open, choking air.

“Have courage, Kara,” Alura says, thankful for the backsplash of froth on the boat's edge, masking her own tears.

“The Oracle… she’ll keep you safe?”

“Oh, darling,” Alura says, pulling Kara’s forehead close, placing her lips once more against her daughter’s flesh. She can never kiss her enough, never enfold her and protect her in the ways she wishes, against creature and current alike, against the crushing inevitable. “You have always had the heart of a hero, Kara. And I will always be with you.”

Alura dips her head and removes the pendant from her neck. It’s tangled in her hair, her straight, unshorn locks that ripple constantly behind her as they swim in their homewaters. She yanks at the chain and it takes a clump of strands with it, brown like driftwood curling around Kara’s sleek golden hair as she slips the pendant over her daughter’s head.

“Astra and I will come for you. Once it’s safe, Kara.”

“Will she fight again?”

Alura laughs, gripping the lip of the metallic rim so hard it wilts beneath her strong fingertips. On this night of loss, that is one question she can answer with utter certainty.

“Oh, yes, Kara. She would brave the deepest trenches searching for you.”

“She would brave the deepest trenches in search of a crab, mother,” Kara says knowingly, her smile saddened by talk of her favorite aunt, her best friend. “You promise to come for me?”

“As surely as the whales sing,” Alura promises. “Yet there are more battles to fight, and you are not yet ready for those. You must face your own battle on land, with Kal-El at your side. You have not far to travel, young Kara, for I have mapped the currents, and will provide the wave. Stick to the shallows, and may the Oracle grant you safe passage.”

Alura bows her head and places two fingers over the Rune of El about her daughter’s neck, praying for bravery, for hope, for family.

“I love you, Mother,” Kara says, clinging to Alura’s wet, webbed fingers.

“I love you more than life, my darling. Keep your circlet close, for you will return to us,” Alura presses her lips against Kara’s dry palm and runs her thumb over the slim golden bar wrapped round Kara’s skull. The crest of El had been forged into the metal upon her naming ceremony, the proudest day of Alura’s life.

Alura inhales heavily for her own gills have shut after so long in the air. She shoves the stern of the small boat forward and glides alongside it as long as she dares, whispering small encouragements to Kara along the way. Yet erelong, land looms before her, which means she must leave Kara to her fate. And so, with a mighty slice of her cobalt tail, Alura spawns the wave that will send her daughter far, far away from her. And yet her night is far from over; she must turn back to appeal the council, to begin the talks that will free her sister, save their people, and pray the Oracle’s mercy upon her beleaguered soul.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

**TWELVE YEARS LATER**

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

Astra swam to the outcropping of rock separating the sheer walls of the inlet from the horrors of the public _beach_. The very word made the jagged edges of her fins tingle. Yet here she swam, bobbing in the waves, her fingers curling against the stone as she spies the humans on the shore.

The sun shines coral and rose this morning, the color of Con-Tul’s tail. She remembers its snapping strength, whipping back and forth and beating her in every cross-current sprint they ever performed. Astra wouldn’t trade the training years under Con-Tul—though rigorous, harmful, and at times humiliating—for all the shells in the sea. His tail was magnificent, his prowess with the harpoon, even better. The warrior died miserably, like a haddock flopping uselessly on a deck, strung up with a hook in his back and his eyes gouged out for sport. Mutilated upon the fancy of humans. All before the tribal wars took place and long before the Leviathan rose. Long before he could watch his favored pupil rise to fame, and then fall from glory.

All she has left of him are sunrises and twilights.

A gull’s cry jolts her from crippling nostalgia, so she turns her attention back to her morning watch. The surface foam is frothy against the stones, blankets of fuzzy moss and seaweed covering her favorite, comfortable rock, as if the object knew she would be present for observation this dawn. This is the seventh beach in her annual search along the California coast, and she still has five more on her route. But she is narrowing her options. Pinpointing the location with critical exactitude. This beach is quieter, cleaner, and less traveled than most. The modest stretch of shore is situated in a difficult-to-reach area for the humans, but there are the _locals_ , those humans who live close by. _Local_ humans are not the same as the _tourist_ humans, but Astra has yet to distinguish between them.

Sparsely populated beach notwithstanding, Astra knows she’s getting closer. She feels it, deeply, like the seasonal warmth she experienced while imprisoned in the glacier. The tales of Kara’s deeds against the sea creatures grow ever more frequent, the undercurrent of human chatter buzzing with eager intensity, announcements of her achievements running the length of the shoreline. Astra hears human swimmers discuss the super mermaid, sees Kara’s face on the discarded, soggy papers clogging the beautiful ocean, and dreams, in her coldest hours, of the flash of cerulean scale she’d once tickled to trembling as a carefree child in their close tribe.

Kara lives, and she is not far.

Astra knows, not just by instinct, but likewise by evidence. Northward and crawling inland, a channel runs toward the bay and the man-made harbor, where the human vessels rise and sink on waves so gentle they might as well be non-existent. Amid the piers and nodding vessels, varying in size, function, and luxury, there is one that mocks her lonesomeness with curlicued blue lettering and colors she’s only seen on the scales of one other tail.

It’s called the _Alura_.

It is not the largest of the vessels by any means, and yet large enough for one of the humans to move about the deck, illuminate the cabin from the inside with electric lanterns, and dive down from the two metal ladders hurtling over the edges. There are buckets and plastic containers on its two levels, ropes, a net, tarps—the sundry equipment Astra has come to associate with modern and ancient sailors. Yet she has never been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the human captain, and wonders if she ever will be. She cannot remain in the heavily-trafficked bay for fear of unkind wakes and critical eyes. More eyes to spot her, follow her, capture her. It could be simple coincidence. The _Alura_ , betrayal and balm in one name.

Astra has never forgiven her sister. Astra has never loved her any less.

She spreads her webbed fingers, the translucent flaps discolored from the rocks beneath her, the thin skin of her fin dragged against roughness as she moves against the stony products of the land. She crouches, eyeing over-large humans patterned pink and cream, redness on some as bright as lobster shell, darkness on others as wondrously black as the depths. Oh, what she would give to return to her home waters, to swim among the clear seas with her spear at her side, through kelp forests and spectrumed reefs. To strike and feint against Con-Tul’s quickest trainees and swim circles around their dizzied heads. To settle in the silt and listen for her sister’s worrisome call, to fly through the currents with Ul-Nor and Dav-Ko, Melani and Corsica, those in her forces and those in her tribe. To explore caves and crevices with Kara, her Little One forever and always.

It has been twelve years since she has seen them. Five since her escape from the melting prison. And four since the day she arrived back to her home waters and mourned her people, all vanished, save for the traces of a destroyed kingdom beneath scorched sand and jagged ditches, a dismantled ocean shelf, no doubt ravaged by the spiked tail of some great beast.

She’d been right. She had _told_ them it wasn’t alone.

Astra had never felt so bereaved for being proven correct.

But one brief moon ago the tides seemed to pull her eastward, closer and closer to the land. She had avoided the area, ever wary of crossing into her home waters, lest she be haunted by the spirits of those who would not save themselves. Currents whirled about her diadem and carried her toward the California beaches, past lagan and jetsam, dying dolphins trapped in nets, fish gone belly-up from chemical ingestion. Refuse, thick and clogging, floated atop ocean water and sank into the once clear flow—human interference the likes of which the Oracle had forewarned—and yet her people remained unmoving, never striking back for fear of discovery. Preservation of the species was deemed more important than curbing the encroachment of the beings above.

Their carcasses will be discovered regardless, once the Leviathan rises.

What good was that secret? That inaction?

It killed her people.

Killed them all.

Yet on her journey, amid the discarded cans and plastics and toxins, the oils collected on surface water that choked the life right out of the creatures floating around her, Astra found a wet _paper_.

More wet papers, from which she’d acquired one of the transcribed human languages, having learned the many tongues of sailors over the earliest of her years battling the open ocean. But the face on that paper was one she knew well, and perhaps the only remaining face of her kind. A face that resembled her own and yet was not her own, one that she loved with a fervor that was questioned by the elders. For Astra was a warrior mermaid who never relinquished her spear. The harpoons and nets and daggers of shark tooth Astra prioritized above her race, they claimed. A race with unsustainable numbers, Astra recalled bitterly. Never mind the only merman she’d loved she had loved as mentor and not as mate. The Oracle blessed Astra in other ways, so she fought to preserve her people in the way she felt most comfortable, most effective.

But she was derided. For not breeding, she was cast out and scorned. Despite her victory over the Leviathan. Despite Alura’s best efforts on her behalf. All Astra’s marvelous deeds, distilled down to an unused womb.

She wonders if it was the Oracle leading her with those tides. Pulling her closer to Kara, to a mermaid renamed and heralded by the humans as hero for action, not passive incubation. If the council had listened to her, would they have been hunted by the humans, as the council claimed their ancestors were? Kara is now someone to be revered, the Crest of El printed on any number of items Astra has seen at the beach. Would the humans have made an accord? If they had all emerged from the deep with peaceful intentions, discussed oceanic limitations and rules for dumping and pollution regulations, would the humans have acquiesced?

Would everything Astra once held dear still be well and truly gone?

Ghosts and spirits, she thinks, watching the faces of friends and comrades form and dissipate in the foam near her tail fin. She would find Kara, and if it meant remaining perched on this rock, then so be it. Just as her imprisonment took long, wasted time, so too would her approach for the one now called _Supergirl_ by the humans. In the meantime, she would observe the humans at their leisure, some with poles and lines cast out against the backwash, some shifting those legs so quickly, moving at rapid pace along the shoreline.

One small human female pauses in her ritual, some strange contortion of limb and spine, curling upwards while supported on her hands, those foreign _legs_ trailing out over the sands beneath her. She maintains that confounded pose even as another male and female approach. They carry bulky cases and wear skin-tight suits of black from neck to ankle. The female grabs the large dark male by the arm, waiting for the woman on the ground’s ritual to conclude. An exchange, a gesture, and a look to the sea and then—

_Curses,_ their attention turned straight towards her.

Astra disappears as easily as footprints on shorelines, her glimmering scales nothing more than illusion on the water for the humans in this dawning light. Astra doesn’t fear discovery in the way her people once did, for if she were ever pursued, she would fight back. Most times, however, the humans attributed Astra’s presence to a trick of light and water, so her attack count was significantly less than previous years’. But with the surging tides of aggressive sea creatures rearing their monstrous heads from the depths, she wonders if her more peaceful days are behind her.

Astra shoots along the shelf and bypasses a school of fish. As she swims, she's snagged by a wayward fisherman’s hook that she hastily yanks from her arm. A tiny trickle of blood flows. Astra takes care surfacing this time, her head and eyes peeking over the waves to observe the trio: the short, dark-haired female bent upon some strange mat speaks with the large, brown-skinned man in the wet suit, all smiles and familiarity. The other female is taller than the first, slim, clad in the wet suit, with short dark hair that slices against her chin sharper than the quills of an urchin. Astra squints and her vision zooms, powers from below functioning differently when above water. She can see, even from this distance, that the woman’s eyes are wet and weighted, expressive like the sea, but colored the deepest, richest brown, very much like the earth she walks on.

Astra watches as the taller woman surveys the rocks, cranes her head into position and places her flattened palm over her brow to block the glare from the sun. Her interest has left her chattering companions, and is now directed toward the ocean. The woman scans the water, her eyes slowly roving with a consistency that speaks to many hours spent among the waves, for she seems to be tracking her movements, anticipating Astra’s new vantage. Astra ducks back under and decides to visit another beach for the time being. She’ll return to her cave at midday to catalog her dwindling weaponry and then reemerge when there is less scrutiny to be faced onshore.

If one of the melted monsters surges against the water’s edge, she’ll likely be able to hear it. She almost hopes for the attack, brutal and bloody as it might go, if it means she gets her eyes on Kara.

After all, Kara is all she has left.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“I really think you should give Hank a call,” Alex whispers to her.

James kneels over the case of photography equipment, looking for some thousand dollar attachment that will likely nab him his next Pulitzer. Alex looks on nonchalantly, her GoPro clutched in hand like some underwater grenade.

“I told you earlier,” Lucy mumbles back, keeping her voice low. The last thing she needed was James worriedly hovering over her while she weighed her options for employment with a secret marine agency. He’d already been unnecessarily hovering for… other reasons. “I’m keeping my options open.”

“You still have his number, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then promise to think about it,” Alex says. 

“Think about what?” James asks, turning over his shoulder. There’s so many different housings and lenses and strobes and filters in those cushioned cases Lucy wonders how he keeps track of all the different accoutrements. She supposes it’s like any library of information, though. Keep a thorough enough catalog, study, work hard, and maybe you’ll get by on more than family name. James did it. Got by because he was _good_ , not because he was known.

“Coming with you guys,” Lucy lies, because her bluff’s always been as good as her bite. “Like I was telling the good doctor here, I’m on vacation.”

“You know Miss Grant would have you back in a heartbeat,” James says, with that comforting smile Lucy crossed a continent for. Why, god, _why_ did she think it would do any good to uproot her life and come play at beachside living in California? Especially when James has so obviously moved on...

“Let her reassess,” Alex takes up for her. “She quit CatCo for a reason. God knows I’ve been trying to get Kara to do the same.”

“It’s not all bad up there,” James counters. “Miss Grant’s not as terrible as you make her out to be.”

“Kara’s driving three hours both ways just to keep that woman informed of everything happening back in the city,” Alex argues. “Who just decides to up and leave her company on a whim?”

“She only has about a hundred perfectly capable department heads in her employ,” James checks. “One of which is taking a personal day so you can get these samples.”

“Fine, fine,” Alex says, huffing in defeat, though Lucy can tell it’s not quite concession. “I won’t agree with you, but I’m not going to argue either. We’ll let Lucy have the rest of the day to… think things over.”

“Luce?” James questions hesitantly.

“Don’t worry about me James, the sun’s hardly up,” Lucy smiles back.

“Few more sun salutations to go?”

“Might cut it short this morning,” she stoops, rolling up her yoga mat. “The mist on the water up here is just…”

“It’s gorgeous, good for exploring. Deep thinking and life considerations and all that,” Alex nods, glancing toward the cliffs and rock formations to the south. “There’s a lot worse places to be. Come on, James. Show me how this camera works.”

Alex and James make their way north along the rocky shoreline. From her time in the Navy, Lucy know it can be a little dangerous, diving so close to sheer cliff faces, the force of the ocean hurling their bodies into eroded rocky spires. She doesn’t fear _for_ them, necessarily. James had taken her scuba diving on one of their first dates—that’s when she’d fallen a little in love with his pictures, when he’d shown her what made him a Pulitzer Prize winner, bringing the attention of the dumping problems the oceans were facing to the rest of the world.

Lucy shoulders her bag and looks out at the mist over the ocean. She starts walking south, dragging her toes in the sand, leaving the public beach and crossing the rocks to rougher territory. She needs the space to think. There’s certainly no shortage of space here, among cliff faces and wildflowers and verdant lagoons and rocky arches that possess a primordial architecture. It’s eerie. It’s quiet. It makes her think about making "it" work all the way out here. The sprawling, crowded, unrelenting pace of National City pales in comparison to this ease. People make it work here, Lucy thinks. Among the rocky ruins and waves and undisturbed greenery, she could make it work.

Alex Danvers makes it work, but that special agent was an entirely different story. Lucy had met Alex in passing, when her JAG duties had taken her to the secret government facility near the seaside known as the DEO. Her brief stint there, working alongside Supergirl, meeting Alex Danvers, seeing a _sea serpent_ … it made Lucy feel like she could put her naval and legal experience to good use. The DEO was an organization that didn’t scrape and bow whenever her father, or her boyfriend, or her sister walked through the front doors. A clean slate. All she had to do was prove herself. Director Henshaw’s number has been discreetly saved to her contacts, and her thumb itches to press the call icon.

What’s stopping her?

James, for one. He’s around more than Lucy would like for him to be. She’s over him. They’re done. It’s just hard when he pops up everywhere she is, a public beach several hours north of his apartment, for one. Plus, there’s the position calling her name at Pearl Harbor. A jump in rank to Commander. _Commander_ Lucille Lane. Paycheck increase. _Hawaii_. A little more court room work, more naval administrative and legislative jaw-wagging, but she’d be so far away from anyone with preconceived notions about her family she’d never have to worry about being so-and-so’s daughter or so-and-so’s sister. She’d just be Commander Lane. Beachside tanning with a legal thriller and a fruity coconut cocktail.

Pretty good gig, by most standards, if significantly more laid-back than Lucy imagined her life being.

Not to mention, the DEO knows Supergirl. _Works_ with Supergirl. Lucy doesn’t look forward to working closely with Flipper’s first cousin. Supergirl is a _mermaid._ A living, (not breathing), swimming, merperson. It's fascinating but a little off-putting, placing all of her trust for the safety of the oceans in the hands of one woman... girl... merlady. 

Lucy shakes her head, trying to rid herself of those thoughts. _She's doing good for the coastline._ No matter what affronted Naval pride Lucy might harbor, she cannot deny that Supergirl does good.

Then again, if the DEO is anything like the Navy, there’s likely divisions and subdivisions and groups and subcategories. What’s the likelihood of her running into Supergirl everyday?

Lucy huffs, climbing over a series of rocks that are smooth, big as couch ottomans. She kicks at the water in a tidal pool, tadpoles and guppies scurrying around her toes. They dart between her ankles and one funny-looking brown fish burrows into the sand, as if Lucy might scoop him up and take him home to some multi-gallon tank. She splashes out of the pool and tosses her yoga mat and bag on the sand, happy to explore some of the bright cave walls among the weathered sandstone. The arches and caves are smooth, massive, hollowed by wind and the relentless sea. The early sun shines sparkly on the walls like a natural mural just for her. It’s gorgeous, the dancing lights underscored only by the suction sound of waves at her knees.

She certainly doesn’t get this view, these sounds, or this privacy on the busy beaches closer to National City.

Another notch in the pro column.

It just makes sense. She should take the job, but… _why_ is she doubting? All signs point to the DEO. If only the universe could send her some definitive _sign_ , then she’d tell her whirling brain to shut up and take the damn job, no more questions asked.

She ducks into one of the arches and watches as the light plays over the water. It’s dimmer beneath the rock, the sun not fully slipped over some of the cliffs to the east. But it’s no less otherworldly—Lucy flashes back to her earliest days on the naval bases, the one in Japan or Guam, or was it those several years hopping around Florida? Or Bahrain? She cannot recall. All she knows is that the sea is a part of her, that she play-acted as mermaids in the oceans with Lois in every port the world over when they were younger. And now, to know they exist… well, _one_ exists, if Cat Grant’s inside-scoop can be believed.

It’s crazy. Crazy awesome. Crazy terrifying.

And not just mermaids. But… dragons. Creatures she doesn’t even know the name of, aqueous blobs and submarine monsters that only the topmost echelons of the Navy know about. The Navy and the DEO. She could be a part of that secret world.

Glancing toward the arch’s exit, Lucy notices a strange collection of brown near the rock formation’s edge. It’s still pretty dark among the sandstone, so her eyes could be playing tricks. The water is cold here, no sun shining on the surface, no multitude of beach-going legs to churn it to activity. Just the steady drag, in and out, like the rock is almost breathing. But there, that brown and… green? It must be kelp, clotted up as it is, attached to the side of the wall by a—

Hand.

That’s a hand.

“Hey!” Lucy hollers over the slosh of waves. “Hey! Are you okay?”

No answer.

Lucy stumbles through the water as the shelf slips lower and the ceiling of the arch lurches above her head. The water is up to her hips by the time she reaches the… woman. Definitely a woman, if the whole topless thing is any indication.

“Hey,” Lucy says, reaching out to pull the largest chunk of straight, soaked brown hair away from her face. The woman’s face is pale as moonlight, vacant, tiny droplets of sea water congregating on her upper lip. She has one arm latched to the rock wall and the other dipped down and across her torso, everything from her collarbone down disappeared beneath the frigid waters.

“H-Hello,” she manages.

“What are… are you alright?” Lucy asks, removing her hand with the same care she used to touch the woman in the first place.

“I’m… in-injured,” she says, pulling her other hand up. And even with the swirling water around them, Lucy sees the glint of coagulated red beneath the woman’s fingernails.

“Oh god, okay, okay, we’ve got to get you to shore.”

The woman’s eyes go wide. “No, please…”

“You’re hurt, you can’t stay in the water.”

“No, my… my diadem.”

“Your what?” Lucy asks, finally noticing the woman’s shivers. Lucy slips down further into the water, ruining her cut-offs, soaking her tank-top through. She gently reaches out to touch the woman’s shaking shoulder, fearful of setting her off. “You’re freezing,” she mumbles.

“I can’t…” the woman chokes, winces, tries to hold back her cries. “I can’t swim.”

“You can’t _swim_?!” Lucy repeats, gobsmacked. “Then what are you doing out here?”

“No, I c-can’t swim _like this_. You d-d-don’t under-st-stand.”

“Calm down, just… just wait,” Lucy flounders, bobbing in the water at the arch’s edge. There’s only open ocean before her, dark rock and sea shelf behind. “I’ve got a towel back with my stuff. And my cell’s probably got crap reception but we need to get you to a hospital, okay?”

“No, please—”

“Listen, calm down,” Lucy says, placing her palms overtop the woman’s bare shoulders once more. “Breathe with me, okay?” Lucy tries to time her breaths with the rush of waves, tries to calm the woman’s rapid-fire pulse, urgent under her fingertips. Lucy feels it humming under her palms, skin so close to the woman’s straining neck. A neck that looks… suspiciously lumpy in places. Maybe it’s some… cosmetic thing? She doesn’t mean to, but as she breathes her fingers run over the tiny lumps and the woman gasps, grabs her wrist roughly, wincing from the effort.

“Don’t,” she says.

“I’m sorry, I…I’ve got to take you to shore,” Lucy says, wriggling her wrist from the woman’s (surprisingly strong) hold. “I won’t hurt you, I swear. But I have to get a look at your side if we have any hope of fixing it. It could get infected out here.”

“Please don’t call anyone,” the woman says. “Please. I can’t… I can’t be found.”

“Why?” Lucy asks, furrowing her brow. Her mind automatically jumps to abusers and victims, someone’s faked death, another identity, an escape gone wrong. Perhaps she’s being overly dramatic, but the woman’s fear seems so genuine that it’s got to be inspired by some very real danger. “I’m a lawyer. If someone’s after you, or threatening you, I can help.”

“You’re… pardon? What are you?”

“A lawyer?” Lucy responds.

“You are not… human?”

“No... I’m that…” Lucy trails off, noticing the glazed look in the woman’s green eyes, flecks of amber and aquamarine playing about, as if her irises can’t quite decide what color they want to be. It’s… hypnotic almost. But Lucy shakes her head, tries to focus on things like pupil dilation and not kaleidoscope colors, wondering if she needs to add head injury to this mysterious woman’s physical dossier. “I’m just… let me help you? Please?”

The woman closes her eyes, defeated. “Very well, I… it’s my side.”

“Where…?”

“Left… my ribs, my… stomach,” she says, gritting her teeth together as Lucy tries to maneuver her around.

“I think the water can help us. I’m going to grab you from behind, under your arms, and pull you in. Okay?”

“You are quite… small,” the woman says, roving a critical eye over Lucy, the water lapping at her chest and splashing up her nose.

“But I’m very strong,” Lucy smiles, determined.

“And quite… ah! Persistent, it seems,” the woman answers, shifting so Lucy can slip her hands beneath the woman’s armpits. There’s kelp in her hair and she smells like _sea_. Salt and shell and sand all mixed together. Lucy thinks about concentrating that scent and going into the scented candle business.

“You have no idea,” Lucy grits back, beginning the arduous process of moving the woman further inland.

It’s slow going, with Lucy trying not to jostle her, but once she gets to the rocks, it becomes even more difficult. The woman cries out more than once and Lucy issues a slew of apologies and silent swears, chomping down on her teeth so that she can drag this woman who is, seriously, at least five or six inches taller than she is, across the obstacle course of tidal pools and rock formations. Lucy places the woman, fully nude, pale as moonlight, upon a rock to rest while she darts toward her yoga mat. She’s back in a flash, has the yoga mat unfurled and the woman lying prone to ensure some degree of modesty.

“How bad is it?” the woman asks, her arms folded up beneath her chin, tears sliding out of the corner of her eyes.

“It’s deep…” Lucy intones seriously, retrieving her towel to start wiping away the excess blood. “But I think something’s clotting. It’s not… it could be worse.”

“I suppose that’s a blessing.”

“Not if this sand gets in it without disinfectant. I’ve got to call an ambulance.”

The woman grabs her again. “Please, no, I can’t… I just need my diadem. If I can find it, I’ll be… I’ll heal faster.”

“Heal faster?” Lucy balks, wilting under the strength of the grip against her wrist. This woman has been recently _stabbed_. How can she hold onto her forearm with vice-like pressure? “This is a deep flesh wound. You’re going to need stitches. And a diadem? Like… a crown? What the hell does a crown have to—oh my god.”

Lucy scrambles back from the woman, assesses her long, lithe frame, hair that falls all the way down her back. Her aquamarine eyes, her forlorn expression, her skin of tissue paper, of egg-shell, oF porcelain and alabaster, as if she hasn’t seen the sun in years. And a diadem? Lucy’s been fairly up-to-date with most fashion trends, accessories, bags, jewelry, hats. All thanks to Lois, then moving on her own and landing gigs with women like Cat Grant. But there’s only one person, or… _mer_ person who wears anything that looks like a _crown_ in broad daylight.

“What’s your name?” Lucy asks cautiously.

The woman mumbles into her arm.

“What? I didn’t catch that.”

“My name is Alura,” the woman says again.

“Alura,” Lucy repeats. It’s different. Very different. Lucy’s lived a lot of places, but she’s never come across an Alura before.

“What is your name?” Alura asks, smiling through her pain. “Or shall I just c-call you small and strong?”

“An apt description, but I prefer Lucy,” Lucy says.

“Lucy,” Alura grins, but it hurts her, the edges of her thin, salty lips twitching into a grimace. She shifts to her side and her body curves in on itself, her left side exposed to the air, her arms coming up to wrap across her body and to clutch at her wound. “That is a l-lovely name, Lucy.”

“Alura I… I want to help you. But you have to promise not to think I’m crazy.”

“You’ve shown no indications of insanity so far. In fact, you’ve been quite level-headed in your rescue efforts, though I fear they might be too late,” Alura pulls her hand away from the gash, the blood oozing slowly from the wound. Dark and thick, more like oil than blood in texture and color.

“Not if I can get you the medical treatment you so obviously need,” Lucy says, reaching out to touch Alura as gently as she dares upon her exposed shoulder blade. “You say you don’t want me to call anyone—”

“The human authorities cannot learn of my presence,” Alura wheezes.

“Alura, are you… are you a mermaid?” Lucy asks, watching for any signs of a tick on Alura’s face. She’s interrogated witness after witness on the stand, in tiny rooms with one-way glass and in fancy corridors outside of a judge’s chambers. She’s learned to read faces and gestures as easily as she does the Naval Code.

“That is a silly question,” Alura answers, hissing through her clenched teeth. “Of course I am a mermaid.”

“Well, you see… you’re lacking one pretty big piece of anatomy for a mermaid.”

“I know,” Alura says. “I didn’t want to believe it, but… I…” Alura’s face spasms and her body goes rigid. Lucy’s not a _human_ doctor let alone one for marine life, so she can’t really tell if Alura is seizing or trying to regrow a tail or preparing to sprout a dorsal fin from her spine.

“Okay… okay, Alura? Alura, stay with me!” Lucy says, placing her hand around Alura’s bicep to steady her rigid posture. “I’m going to call someone… not the police. Someone who’ll take care of you. Alura?” Lucy squeezes her fingers against Alura’s arm and tries to get her back to coherency. “Alura, come on, damn!”

Lucy scrambles for her phone and prays for any type of reception on the wild seashore. Her fingers are wet and her hands are shaking. It takes her two tries before she can properly scroll to Henshaw’s number, swiping indiscriminately at all the water dropping on her screen.

“Come on, pick up pick up pick—Director Henshaw! Hello, Lucy Lane.”

Lucy crawls back to Alura on the beachside, breathing shallowly, toes twitching, ankles flopping, as if they are completely foreign pieces of her anatomy.

“Been thinking about that job offer, and I accept. And now that I’m on your team, I need an extraction unit and a motor boat deployed one and a half miles south of Sand Dollar beach. Send a marine medic, too. I’m fifty yards inland, back in the rocks behind the major arch. Sir I… I think I found another mermaid.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Cat Grant is _fine_.

If ever meteors struck and destroyed all she’d built in the past twenty-five years, she could go back to gossip writing. The first headline, eye-catching because of its utter lack of salaciousness, would read, in all caps, with enough exclamation marks to send a copy editor into cardiac arrest: BREAKING NEWS: CAT GRANT IS FINE!!!!!!!!

She looks out the windows from the executive suite on her yacht, the mid-morning reflections of the west coast beckoning her out toward the water. She’ll go to the beach this afternoon, she thinks, and take Carter with her while she’s at it. Wear the light linen she’d had special delivered from Barney’s, let the press snap a picture or two from their perches beyond the private property signs. That should keep them busy, feed them enough fodder of an unexciting afternoon as a mother (not a mogul) that they'll leave her in peace for the rest of the week.

Cat is fine, she insists (to herself, for there’s no one else in the floating office for her to insist _to_ ), which is why she’s moved her base of operations from the floor of a high rise in the heart of National City three-ish hours north, to her beach property, working out of the boat docked at the private yacht club Spielberg attends. She has papers strewn atop a rich wooden desk in a tasteful suite on the uppermost level of _Grant’s Way_ , a personal commission she’d helped design when company value had gone into nine digits a decade previously.

Cat is fine.

Which is why she is on “executive sabbatical.”

The gossip rags think it’s rehab, not that she didn’t toy with the idea once upon a dark time in her late 30s, after four dailies had gone belly-up just like Supergirl’s latest triumphs. Several drunken nights and two late entries to work had put an end to her depression over print sales. She’d adjusted, refocused her sights on digital, knowing, far sooner than most, where the consumption patterns were shifting. She then pounced while others sat around with their thumbs up places thumbs shouldn’t be and swiftly recovered the financial hit.

It’s not even sabbatical, not truly, not when she’s still editing and interviewing and doing more writing of her own than she has in quite some time—far more substantial than _The Lighthouse Technique_ , anyway. Not that that writing will ever see the light of day, either. Farther north, away from the smog and city congestion and international conference calls, Cat looks for perspective.

Cat knows she’s the head of one of the largest media corporations on the planet. She keeps a seaside villa. Takes calls from the executive suite of a personalized, private yacht. Has a closet the likes of which her front-end developers might move their entire families into. She needs to reassess, and the sea might just help her do it.

Focusing on her green initiatives for the company, she’s taken these last two weeks to listen to advisors, to draft a new plan she’d like to implement at company HQ by the start of the fourth quarter. She’s also nurturing a brainchild for that green division, specifically targeted toward marine news, technology and science. CatCo has its share of holdings and copyrights for tech and special interest mags, even a few trade journals; but ever since Supergirl cropped up on the shores just north of National City six months ago, Cat has been gobbling up every bit of information about oceanic news she can get her hands on. The brainchild—a daily digital newsletter/app focusing on seaworthy topics—would split Supergirl coverage with the _Trib_ , which should keep the daily afloat but likewise tie-in with special marine interests. Marine interests for which she’s got to do even _more_ research.

She’s read about pirates who don’t just steal music files, poachers who kill endangered wildlife, oil spills and off-shore drilling and huge, floating dumps in the middle of the sea, thousands of injured marine life flung upon shores by tidal shifts, natural waters contaminated by pollutants. Melting polar icecaps. The Gulf Stream. El Niño. _Finding Dory_. All of these topics she can easily wrap her head around… but mermaids? Powerful, super-strong mermaids with abilities that reach beyond aquatic limitations—that’s something she never could have guessed.

She’d sooner believe in aliens falling from the sky than merfolk harboring the deep.

Cat remembers one story specifically about an entire pod of whales dying, left rotting on the seaside, their ribs reaching heavenward, large cages of powdery bone stabbing the sky. While three miles south a family of four buried the youngest up to his neck, laughed at a hermit crab by his ear, took a photograph. Burying a five-year-old is one thing. No one, however, can bury a whale carcass, let alone an entire pod of rotting whale flesh. It was good writing. Interesting juxtaposition of carnage and carnival, boardwalk and burial. Cat had even thought about having the author do a piece in the digital newsletter she wanted to launch, and had made contact with a few publishers, tracking down the writer. She’d been young, east coast, written the essay in ivy league undergrad. Had already had two pieces published in _The Metropolitan_ , already lined up for a staff position by the magazine. Twenty-two. Wrote like a rock-star sang. Died three weeks after college graduation thanks to a drunk driver.

Twenty-two.

Cat had taken one look at Kara through scotch goggles one late night when she’d been all about seizing her moments, especially after the disheartening revelation about the twenty-two year old…

And Cat had kissed her.

Three days after that total aneurysm, Cat had relocated here, to her yacht, searching for some perspective she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to find. She’s a city gal, Cat is, but the seaside proximity and the appearance of her aquatic Supergirl had been too big a cash cow to push aside—plus, the project had been distraction from the rather pressing personnel issue she’d been blatantly ignoring for the past two weeks. She’d stumbled her way through a hungover apology with overlarge sunglasses and a cool water bottle against her temple the mortifying morning after, but it didn’t feel right.

Not for Cat. Certainly not for Kara.

But Cat Grant is _fine_.

That’s what her therapist says. The new one she’d started visiting once she’d relocated to this beachy suburb, after she’d missed several appointments with Dr. Saperstein in the city— who’d told her in no uncertain terms that kissing one’s assistant might be sign of some sort of mid-life crisis. Especially an assistant who was half her age. Saperstein had tried to hide the surprise when Cat had also mentioned Kara was a woman. Those plucked, cyan-brown eyebrows had migrated north over the good doctor’s spectacles as she scribbled more on her notepad than she had in earlier sessions (obvious mother issues, consummate anxiety, a surface temper easily provoked), then asked her outright if she had feelings for the girl, to which Cat responded with a vehement _no_.

Cat Grant is fine.

Which is why she upended her daily routine for the first time in her entire life and fled the city like a child caught with her hand in the M&Ms jar. She reaches mechanically for her stash and scoffs when her manicured fingernails scrape nothing but empty crystal. Cat removes one of the several pairs of glasses she’s wearing on her head and fists her hands at her temples, stares down at three horrible column ideas for the new digital newsletter. _Lorem ipsum_ would likely be clearer than the garbage she’s been reading for the past hour.

It would be so much easier, sometimes, for her to go back to routine, to chuck her minor indiscretion into the waste bin like she does with all new copywriters’ first projects (just so they don’t get too cocky), and have done with it. It would help if she could stop _thinking_ about it, if she couldn’t remember it so clearly, clear as the tide pools outside the villa, clear despite her drunkenness, clear like the desired clarity she’s been aimlessly searching for over the past two weeks. Kara is three months short of holding Cat’s demanding EA position for two years, and Cat wonders, with that kiss, and with that _girl_ , if the reason Kara’s lasted so long is because Cat might…

Never mind the clarity. Cat has relocated to the beach, which means there’s less stigma here for day drinking.

Cat is halfway to the bar crafted from cherry wood and golden plating around the curved edges, halfway to the decanter full of Scotch, halfway to less clarity and more guiltless buzz, when she hears the knock.

“Miss Grant?”

Cat whirls around and places her hands on the back of her hips, under her blazer hem, as if she’s just been pacing the floor of her bobbing ship and certainly not contemplating two fingers of scotch at 10:37 a.m. on a Tuesday.

“Kiera,” Cat says, taking in the armful of folders the girl has in her grasp, the slightly tilted glasses, the dishwater blonde hair half-up and swept to the side. Her cheeks are tan, shoulders square, half of her shirt untucked because the files are riding against the fabric.

Clarity.

_Damn_.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Kara mutters, as if it’s her fault that she’s forced to play commuter assistant, up and down the highway in a company car because Cat can’t get her shit together enough to remain in the same building with the girl for forty… fifty hours a week. “Traffic and… well, here are the reports from marketing, layouts for August issue, and the SEO reports on the outdoor quarterly. Actually got a fair bit of traffic on the SuperSurfer hashtag, skewing toward preteens more so than 18-49s.”

“Any notes from Liza?” Cat asks, looking to marketing first. Solid trial numbers around Supergirl’s _Save the Sea_ pitch she’s been tweaking here and there, but nothing outstanding. Cat wants wow-factor. Too bad she only gets that nowadays when her assistant comes scooting onto the premises.

“Good numbers for the ad campaign, though I know you want better,” Kara responds, placing the remaining stack of accordion folders atop a desk far less cluttered than the one back in the white-washed and glass walls of CatCo. “I told her as much, asked her for the team to rethink the slogan because you’d want to hear the pitches. I can call you with what they come up with before the sit-down Friday. Oh, and you have that business lunch with Hobbes and Amir from Pacifica at the clubhouse today. I sent you a text this morning, but you never… anyway.”

Cat hears the crinkle of packaging and watches as Kara opens an overlarge bag of M&Ms and pours them into her jar.

“I wanted to make sure you remembered.” She replaces the top and rights the crystal container so that it sits within perfect reaching distance for when Cat takes her seat in the leather-backed executive chair.

Kara produces her tablet, turns toward Cat, and awaits the morning’s comments.

Comments that Cat will never be able to get through with any degree of coherency if she doesn’t address the elephant in the room. She and Kara both have spent the better portion of two weeks completely ignoring it, but even with the buoyancy of the water surrounding her, Cat rather feels like Dumbo is crushing her.

“Kara,” Cat says again, removing her hands from her hips and crossing them over her chest.

Kara looks up expectantly.

“I know this arrangement isn’t ideal, the commuting I mean.”

“It’s not so bad,” Kara shrugs. “I get my hands on the company car at least. I don’t drive when I’m in the city.”

“Public transit?”

“Uhh… yes,” Kara says, looking back at her tablet.

“I’m rethinking the weekly schedule,” Cat starts. “Instead of driving up midweek and going back and forth, move the department meeting from Wednesday to Monday, rework the deadline dates. Then you can collect the notes and drive them up here on Thursday, stay overnight so I can have you more than one day a week.”

“Miss Grant?” Kara’s head shoots up from her schedule.

“For _work_ ,” Cat is quick to correct, clearing her throat and tapping her fingertips in a distracted beat against the bar. “At the company’s expense, of course. Put you up in a hotel, you’d be free to go by two or three p.m. Fridays, as long as the departments have my notes for the rescheduled Monday meetings.”

“Oh, oh of course, I can… I’ll get right on that,” Kara says as Cat turns her attention to the bar. “Although, if it’s just one night a week, I can stay at my sister’s place. Less company cost that way.”

“You sister lives here?” Cat asks.

“Not exactly. She’s got a main apartment in the city, but during summer season, she stays on her boat,” Kara explains. “Not here, of course, but in Limetown Bay? It’s not even fifteen minutes away.”

“You said she was a scientist, correct?”

“Marine biologist.”

“Well, that sorted itself. And fifteen minutes is a good deal better than three and a half hours,” Cat continues, settling for just a significantly smaller Scotch than what she would have poured had Kara not come striding through her door.

And now onto more dicey matters. Ask anyone in business and they’ll say Cat Grant is certainly appreciative of the direct approach. However, the direct approach is a fraction more risky when it could result in a lawsuit, public scandal, and potential custody renegotiation from the fall-out. Cat tips the decanter over the lip of her glass just a _tad_ longer.

“Sit, please,” Cat motions toward the sofa and free standing chairs in the office. “You’ve obviously had a long drive. Would you like a drink?”

“Oh, uhm… no, thank you,” Kara replies, settling into the seat closest to Cat’s desk. She’s twitching nervously, clutching that tablet like it might protect her against any further liquid options from Cat’s bar. It's understandable. Cat's being uncharacteristically nice. “Miss Grant… are you—?”

“We’ll get to my notes on the marketing projections in a moment,” Cat says, adding a splash of club soda. She doesn’t want to be sloshed before a business lunch she completely forgot about because she’d made Kara’s life even more hell than she knew it already was. Even in the corporate world, a seven a.m. start is murder. She takes a sip, followed by a deep breath, then turns from the bar to address her assistant: “I’d like to talk about the evening I kissed you.”

“Miss Grant,” Kara deflects, and Cat can already see that deferential dip of the head, downturned chin, bronzey blush burning high in the girl’s cheeks. “You’ve already—”

“No, no I haven’t,” Cat interrupts, sauntering toward her desk. She takes one look at the intimidating leather chair across from where Kara sits and is immediately unsettled by the implicit power dynamics. “Not like professionals, and not with the respect that you deserve, Kara.”

“Who knew a kiss was all it took for you to get my name right?” Kara shrugs one unsure shoulder.

“Touché,” Cat mutters, taking a sip of fizz, scotchy bubbles stinging her tongue.

“I’m not… I’m not fired, am I?” Kara asks softly, fingers still clenched around the edges of her smart tablet.

“No, no of course not, especially not if we’ve just rearranged your schedule,” Cat says, propping herself against the desk, one hip cocked as if she can stand with a confidence she certainly doesn’t deserve in the moment. “I had hoped that was the one thing I’d made clear.”

“It’s just, you’ve…” Kara makes a pointed sweep around the executive cabin. “Made some obvious changes.”

“Quite.”

“And I didn’t know… my hours… that is, I didn’t want to presume—”

“Words, Kara.”

Kara places the tablet on the desk, sits back heavily in the chair. “Is all this my fault?”

“This? What this?”

“Your… _sabbatical_.” Kara says it like a curse word with a cute little sneer—no, not cute, just a small sneer, a twitch of upper lip tilting and a flare of nostril. It is most certainly not _cute_. “The relocation. The newsletter, the marine projects, the green initiative—”

“You’re giving yourself an awful lot of credit for one kiss,” Cat quips lightly.

“You announced the move three days later.”

“Correlation does not equal causation,” Cat remarks, at which Kara simply arches a brow.

“Are you looking for an apology?” Kara mumbles. “Because I really don’t know what more there is to say. You were drunk, I was… there. It was after the party, you’d just given the speech of your life. I didn’t mean to—that is, I don’t blame—”

“None of that excuses my behavior,” Cat says, shifting once more and settling in the chair beside Kara so that she no longer stands over her, no longer hovers, still wary of violating any of those unequal dynamics for this conversation. “Kara, if I were you, and I was a man my age, in my position, I’d slap a lawsuit on record the second I touched you. I’m not asking for you to apologize. _I’m_ apologizing. And I want you to know that it is within your rights to file a complaint with HR. Nothing will be swept under the rug. I promise.”

“Why…” Kara’s gaze is puzzled, searching, as if more than the ship is throwing off her sense of balance for this conversation. “Miss Grant, first of all, I would never. But why did you… why did you wait so long to have this conversation?”

Cat wonders that herself. She’s only been thinking about it in her every spare moment, and Cat has never been one to stew over her mistakes. But this feels… like a very big mistake. So why can’t she get over it? She’d spent more time on this during her therapy sessions than she had on her hygiene neuroses, which is quite the step, Dr. Saperstein had said. Cat stares out the windows toward the ocean and takes another sip of scotch.

“I don’t really know myself,” she admits, though she’d never planned on mentioning that uncertainty to Kara. She _never_ plans on opening up to Kara, but that doesn’t seem to stop her. “I have several personal issues you don’t need to worry over.”

“When you’re unhappy, my commute time multiplies by seven,” Kara fires back. “I’d like to know if you’re willing to share.”

“Well,” Cat smirks, placing her glass atop a coaster on the desk. “Supergirl, first and foremost. I like to be where the action is, and her workload has been picking up in recent months.”

Kara follows her gaze out the window toward the harbor. “Tell me about it.”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing,” Kara returns quickly, adjusting her glasses. “Only, that makes sense, I suppose.”

“Plus with the twenty year anniversary, the huge spreads we did at the beginning of the year and opening the Dubai branch… did you know Carter starts high school in three weeks?”

Cat thinks of Carter back at the beach house with Marta, probably attached to that game console without her there to prod him toward other activities. Carter, who is as tall as she is now, with hair just as curly and unruly as hers was at his age. Loaded down with a backpack and ostracized due to intellectual interests in the jungle of social circles. _High school._

“Really?” Kara asks. “I thought he was only thirteen?”

“Late birthday for the school term in May, so fourteen now,” Cat corrects. “Youngest in his class, plus, he’s skipped a grade in workload. It’s… I don’t know why I’m nervous.”

“Because he’s your son,” Kara says, terribly reasonable despite all the nonsense over the past two weeks. “That’s… I think I knew all of these things were happening separately, but you handle them so well, Miss Grant. It’s understandable if you’re… tired or… I don’t know. A little burnt out.”

“You seem to be echoing my new therapist,” Cat mumbles.

“Did you fire Dr. Saperstein?”

“No, but I did want someone local to on call in case I decided to take advantage of any cabana boys while on this vacation.”

“This is hardly a vacation,” Kara corrects, indicating the mountain of files she just brought in. “And, forgive me for being forward, but… I don’t think the cabana boys would have any objection.”

“So you wouldn’t believe my final reason for irrationally fleeing the city was a minor degree of embarrassment?” Cat asks, gripping the armrest and locking her challenging gaze with Kara’s. “I hardly exude an air of desperation. Even after the Idris refusal, I was more angry than depressed. But a come-on from a woman old enough to be your—”

“—the Media Queen of National City? Miss Grant, please. If anything I’m extremely flattered,” Kara says, her gaze cutting down to her fidgeting hands. “I’m… I’m young but I’m not blind.”

“Sure, Kara. And your lenses aren’t as thick as the company annual review.”

“You know what I meant,” Kara says lowly, picking nonexistent fuzz off the cuff of her sleeve. Her cheeks take on that flushed bronze look that speaks to her embarrassment.

“Well, perhaps there’s some flattery from both sides,” Cat concludes succinctly, watching as Kara finds her bravery, stills her hands, and tilts her head back in Cat’s direction.

“The fireworks were a little much, though,” Kara chuckles.

“Agreed. Though the investors were impressed, according to my event planners.”

“It was a great night for CatCo, but I never felt uncomfortable with you on your balcony, Miss Grant," Kara clarifies. "There was the phone call from Dubai and I was there to facilitate, simple as that. You… kissed me. It happened. We’ve talked about it and… and I would really appreciate it if we could move on,” Kara finishes, nodding her head as if she’s finalized some sort of big business deal. “And if you were worried about the story leaking, just know I haven’t told anyone. I didn’t think it mattered enough to tell anyone about.”

“Alright then,” Cat says, both relieved and slightly insulted. There were _fireworks_ , and she was _Cat Grant_ , for heaven’s sake.

Cat rises, moving back to her position behind the desk, hoping to work through the files before this lunch with the reps from Pacifica.

“I didn’t feel comfortable moving forward and having you commit to this schedule until we’d discussed it in more detail. That was likely quite selfish of me, leaving you to flounder about for the past two weeks, driving hither and yon to anticipate my moods,” she says, diving into the M&M’s container with greedy fingers. She pops a handful in her mouth and crunches.

“I’m used to it,” Kara smiles warmly.

Perhaps it’s the combination of chocolate sweetness on her tongue and the glimmer on the ocean and Kara’s proximity and the taste of bubbling scotch and seltzer; perhaps it’s that damn clarity she thought she needed to find out here on the open water; perhaps it’s the fact that they’re talking about it so openly; perhaps it is none of those things. But Cat’s feeling the same thrill she felt that night after the roof-top CatCo twentieth anniversary party. When Cat had taken one look at Kara in a borrowed blue cocktail dress and pulled her close, stood on her heeled tip-toes, and planted an ecstatic kiss against the girl’s lips while they were on her private balcony. Those lips had tensed, then melted instantaneously, never quite participating but never quite pulling away, either. Kara had been cool and solid when Cat had been flushed and drunk and squishy in her gown, high on her success. She’d thrown professionalism to the wind because she _knew_ she looked hot and she knew Kara thought so, too.

Lingering looks in the office and late night file reviews and a blush with every compliment (compliments that came easier than insults, which was frankly _unsettling_ the first time Cat picked up on it). Add to that the stuttering when Cat disregarded personal space and decided to play a little game, and the attraction was obvious. Cat suspected hero worship, at first. Misdirected attention, once Lucy Lane came back into town for Olsen. But Kara was sharp, pretty if not stylish, and likely had any number of prospects. So it was interesting that Kara _chose_ to spend those extra evening hours at Cat’s side, amid files and contracts and copyedits and brainstorming boards in Cat’s office, long after Cat had told her to go. “I don’t mind, Miss Grant,” Kara always said.

And then there were the days Kara would come back in after a lunch break, her hair damp, drying at the tips. Cat’s suspicions had grown from there, but it’s not as if her assistant went walking around with a golden crown on her head, a scaly tail stuffed into her trousers. Cat fielded flirtations and theories with the skills she employed during merger negotiations and live broadcasts. Kara Danvers might very well be attracted to her. Flattery, she’d said. And Cat couldn’t really blame the girl, except during Cat’s occasional flights of self-doubt. Kara Danvers might very well be Supergirl. That, Cat could blame her for, but she had less evidence of a super-hero hobby than she did of a corporate crush. Perhaps she would find clarity to the former problem with as much ease as she had found for the latter. Maybe all it takes it oceanic proximity.

She had a month before the summer ended, before she truly needed to get back to CatCo. The digital newsletter would be up and running in no time, and her marine campaign launched with no hitches, if she had anything to say about it.

And hopefully, Cat and Kara both could drown their crushes and _mutual flattery_ in the bay, never to resurface, much to the relief of Cat’s HR team.

“We’ve got an hour and a half before Pacifica shows up,” Cat says, opening the marketing folder. “Let’s start with Liza and those God-awful pitches her team seems set on selling.”

“Yes, Miss Grant,” Kara answers, back to her tablet, adjusting her glasses, and putting the entire affair behind them.

Or so Cat thinks.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The day crawls slowly by as Astra drifts along the coastal shelf. Inland, and then out to sea, avoiding motors and diving past bottles and plastic containers, nearly whacked in the head by a wayward paddle when her attention is otherwise occupied. She’s back at the bay, the boat traffic less busy now that the sun has started sinking. More people bringing boats in, less people going out on the water.

No wonder Astra prefers swimming at night.

But it is not yet twilight and for some reason, her thoughts have drifted to Alura. She dives down deep in the bay and makes the crossing toward the harbor, keeping out of the shallower waters should she scrape the underside of a hull with her scales, should she be blindsided by a prow and knocked to the depths like Mag-Li, or Ferima. Too many of her people, dying at the hands of the humans, and yet Alura prayed for peace constantly. The Oracle, in her wisdom, her sway over the oceans, would show them all the light of survival. Alura had that hope.

Astra however, was blessed with skepticism—a darker pragmatism cultivated in battle, and then behind the cold walls of the glacier. Ever ostracized by the tribe and then stained. Some days she felt broken like the spine of her captain, cracked and split by a harpoon plunging down from the surface. Perhaps witnessing Con-Tul’s fate refined Astra’s preference for the depths to the surface. But the depths were beginning to grow too dangerous. More attacks, and no group to guard her back. The warmth of darkness no longer comforted her as it once did. No longer felt like her second home. And though they sported opposing philosophies, Astra still missed her sister. She wondered if being nearer that beloved surface and closer to Alura’s name would quell her grief in any way.

Astra traces her webbed fingers over the peeling blue paint of the stern.

She is caught up in memory, tangled in Alura’s phantom laughter as surely as she was once tangled in a fishing net offshore. The ghosts are more distracting than ever, figments of Alura or Kara cropping up with an intensity so severe Astra wonders what she’s done in her life to deserve such punishment. It hurts far more than a hook to the shoulder, far more than a harpoon to the tail. Perhaps the images embolden her. Perhaps desperation. But night is close and the foot traffic is practically non-existent midweek on the docks. Investigation would take a moment, an instant, quick as a bubble’s lifetime.

Astra hoists herself up by her arms and drags her body up the rungs of the ladder on the transom of the vessel named for her sister. She huddles against the sweaty deck awaiting the tingles that come—that tugging feeling she can never quite get used to when her gills sew themselves together, when her chest seizes and she takes that first foreign _breath_.

The first night she made the change had been utter shock, but merfolk systems are adjustable. To pressure depth, to coal-black darkness, even to non-aquatic environments. They adapt. It is why they live as long as they do.

Astra feels her tail rend itself apart, her scales slot together and soften to lighter colors. Her honed muscles give way to those bastard limbs called _legs._ She’s never been much good with them. She runs wet fingers over the plane of leg from ankle to kneecap, studying the straight lines the humans are forced to cope with every day. How do they not break? So inflexible, so solidified.

So _revolting_ , Astra thinks, turning toward the railing and pulling herself up to place her _feet_ beneath her. She shifts her foot forward hesitantly and stumbles, clasping hold of the railing with every ounce of remaining strength not milked from her body during the change.

She explores _Alura_. Pulleys, salt-saturated ropes and two impressive masts, standing at attention against a clear, early evening sky. The sails are drawn in, the halyard attached with convoluted rigging, bucket handles secured by hooks near the deck railings. It is… clean, for a human vessel. Well-maintained. Astra whips her head about when she hears the low rumblings of conversation several slips away, the tromp of footsteps on the pier, the shift in sound as the humans pass from wooden boards to fiberglass.

_Not this ship, then_ , Astra thinks, but migrates below all the same, crumpling the exterior door handle in her powerful grip.

The cabin is spacious, but by no means luxurious. The very first time Astra ever thought she would die, she had not been in battle; instead, she’d been thrown onto the carpeted floor of a captain’s cabin. Rich materials had encased soft cushions, shiny trinkets overflowed from hand-crafted trunks, and windows had opened to the glittering sea beyond. The smell of a plant called _tobacco_ singed her nostrils, fumes like the sulfurous geyser fields she’d traversed in the depths emanating from the top drawer of the grizzled captain’s desk. The drawer where he kept his _gun_. The desk with the astrolabe, with the charts, the compass, the framed, dried skin of a merman.

Hundreds of years have passed since that first detainment, and that cabin is nothing like this one. The changes in shipmaking have been both marvel and puzzle; grand ships of extravagance are few and far between, but more people possess boats than ever before. It seems travel and sailing have become _leisure_ activities more so than avenues of commerce, exploration, trade.

There are whirling devices and pressure meters hung upon walls, papers scattered everywhere. White surfaces are covered with tiny machines that blip and bloop, glass containers with growing algae and an entire wall of books— _Aquatic Molecular Structures_ and _Biodiversity in Your Backyard_ and _Anemone or Frenemy? Why the Reefs Hate Tourists_ —strange titles encased in shellacked wood, a bar set across the shelving to keep the tomes in place during sea travel.

Astra runs her hands over the shiny paneling, wondering what could possess this captain to name the vessel _Alura_ (not that the captain had any knowledge of her sister, but still). The boat did not seem much like her sister at all. It was not welcoming in the way Alura was. Sure, there was the occasional knick knack placed here and there that indicated a more personal touch (curtains edged with an anchor pattern, a shiny medallion hung from a hook on the door, photographs and hand-written notes pinned to cork boards, a blanket tossed over end of the sofa built into the wall of the cabin), but the utility of the place overshadowed any homey feel the vessel might have possessed.

Astra was about to turn tail—or legs, in this instance—and swim back to her cave for the evening, but one photograph caught her eye.

The picture’s edge is ripped and overexposed, pinned to the corkboard strip running the length of the cabin overtop the secured shelving. Two children, girls, pail and shovel in hand, up to their elbows in the sand. One foreign, with dark brown hair and eyes the color of wet earth, eyes that smile in a way that had not yet registered loss; and the other girl, blonde and with a smile as bright as her mother's, eyes blue as the ocean, blue as her glorious tail… and yet no tail in sight.

_Kara_ , Astra gasps, yanking the picture from the wall. She runs trembling fingers over Kara’s chin, manufactures nightmares as to why Kara’s missing her circlet in the photo, why Kara’s legs don’t lock and transform despite her proximity to the ocean. Where is her house’s crest? Has she lost it? Forgotten it? Forgotten her family, her mother, her father, the council, the patrols, her aunt Astra, shunned by the tribe—

Certainly not. Not if the vessel is named the _Alura_.

Kara knows this captain, whoever it might be. That tug from the currents, from her instincts, had not misled her. It’s the closest Astra has felt to a lure, the reward for listening to the seaward song. This is the largest clue she’s found since she began searching for survivors a handful of years ago.

Astra cannot pass up the opportunity.

She ransacks the cabin during her concentrated search, but she finds nothing more of Kara. It is not until she hears the hurried footsteps on the deck that she pauses, no longer breathing as the humans do. Her movements cease and fear curdles low in her stomach.

_She will not be left for dead on the floor of the captain’s cabin again._

“Yeah James, I’ve got enough shots and samples to keep me busy for the next decade.”

“I’m always up for the chance to get back in the water.” A male voice.

“Too bad Kara had to work all day, she could’ve joined us.”

“I don’t know if Kara considers a visit to the yacht club any type of real ‘work’.”

Astra drops the book she’s holding, and it falls to the ground with a loud _thunk_.

“Did you hear that?” A female.

“Alex, did you leave your cabin light on?”

“What the—hey!”

Astra bolts.

Or stumbles, somewhat, the damnable _legs_ getting caught beneath her as she dodges protruding cabinets and berths. She flings herself toward the deck stairs, and she feels, strangely, as if she’s floating for the briefest of moments. But it cannot be, trapped as she is in this cloying _air_ , on these surface vessels that do nothing but clog her currents and magick her gorgeous tail into lanky leg.

“I see you—stop!”

Astra does not stop. Instead she launches herself over the railing, turning in mid-air to see—

The woman from the beach. With that wet-earth gaze that scans the water as if she knows exactly where Astra will emerge. Astra fears discovery even though she dives to the deepest portion of the bay, her gills splitting themselves open and her legs fusing together, back to cool, scaly comfort once again. The woman with the cases, with the buckets and the rigging and the… the _nets_.

The books, with theories of the sea and its components. Kara in the photograph beside her, a mysterious connection she cannot deny. Those calculating glances. The wet suit, the cases, her gaping jaw, clutching at the railing as her eyes locked with Astra’s for that split-second in mid-air.

Who was this woman?

Astra had seen some strange device with lenses, nothing like a spyglass, far too weighty to remove with any level of dexterity from its place atop the table. But _samples_ suggest study, and _shots_ something with a weapon, like the gun…           

Astra remains on the bottom of the bay, allowing her pounding heart to quiet itself as she settles against the sandy ocean floor, vowing to wait as temperatures shift, until the surface night is as dark as the bottom of the bay, as dark as her own obsidian tail.

She will watch the woman, and come for her at nightfall.

She will sing her to speech.

And then, after twelve long, lonely years, Astra will find Kara.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

An hour after the break-in, Alex sets out north from Sand Dollar Beach with her surfboard just as the horizon splits the sun in half. She has thirty minutes before she loses every ounce of light. Thirty minutes on a deserted beach on a cloudless evening, to scout the rocky outcropping she swore she saw a mermaid perched upon early that morning. The very same one who’d begun the change when she’d flown over the edge of Alex’s boat. That mermaid that had ducked beneath the waves to escape her notice, who hadn’t counted on Alex’s years of tracing an adopted sister’s slender form as she glided through the water. With Kara to practice with, Alex had honed her depth perception and could gauge distances, track trajectories of marine life that always ended up helping with her own studies.

In all her years on the ocean, Alex has seen a lot of things. But this morning, this evening, has certainly left her flummoxed.

She really wants to talk to that mermaid.

If only to shout at her for ransacking her boat.

Alex carefully picks her way over the slippery surfaces, sliding, then grasping tight to the side of the short board lined with water-proof LEDs Kara had gotten her friend Winn to rig up two Christmases previously. Of course, Alex had always had access to the type of tech that could illuminate her board if she’d really wanted to night surf. She just hadn’t told Kara. Not until about six months ago.

Not until Supergirl.

And they’d gotten past it, pretty much, some of the lying, the secret-keeping, the second life Alex lived outside of National City at the Department of Extranormal Oceanography. Ever since Supergirl made her splash in the ocean as well as the media, the partnership with the DEO had run relatively smoothly. The California coast has its protective sea guardian, in addition to the marine researchers and former Navy and SEAL personnel recruited for specialized oceanic missions. Alex herself had been recruited right out of grad school. She harbored some lingering doubt as to her abilities, as she always would, having a sister like Kara.

But finding a mermaid on her _own_ , with no outside involvement from the DEO? It would be cooler than the time they’d contained the Bakunawa off the northern coast of Tijuana.

Alex puts her surfboard in the water and pushes off the rocky outcropping. With her waterproof spotlight attached to the nose of her board, she paddles with firm strokes, scooping water into her palms and gliding over the ocean under a rising full moon. She rounds the jutting rock formation and keeps a watchful eye on a dark seashore, squinting and scanning the breakers on her left, the sand to her right. She won’t go too far, not in the dark.

But her curiosity fuels her recklessness. What could possibly cause a mermaid to board her ship and then wreck the interior? Was she looking for something? Why had she been watching Alex in the first place? And, if she really was keeping tabs on Alex, why not just drag her under when she’d been taking pictures and samples with James earlier today, when she’d been floating in and out of more exposed waters? Kara had said most of her people had died, that if there were any survivors, they’d probably stay as far away from the surface as they could. And if there was one thing Alex knew about Kara, it was that she hated the bay. All of the boats moving in and out were hazardous, despite the massive dents Kara could make against their hulls. So what would compel a mermaid to swim among such obstacles, unless she was actually _looking_ for something?

For possible human interaction?

It’s beautiful on the water in the twilight. It’s why she prefers coming up here in the summer, where colors coalesce and sky meets water, melts into it, like blue popsicles from the boardwalk sticking to her fingers. There are less tourists on this beach and it’s mere miles from the DEO outpost. It might be closer to Midvale, too, but the nights on the boat make up for the proximity to her hometown, to Eliza, to memories of her father she’ll never be able to escape. Not that she wants to escape them, not that she can. Jeremiah’s the reason Alex loves the sea, the reason she has _Alura_. But she’d like to be this close to home and to her father’s memory without it hurting so damn much. Surfing helps. Work helps. And Kara, Kara always helps, in every way she can. But some nights she needs distraction; and if it’s not a late night in the lab or trotting home from game night with Kara, distraction usually comes at the bottom of a bottle.

Those bottle-nights and hook-ups have lessened significantly since her recruitment to the DEO. Training took precedent and served as excellent distraction. She became a stronger swimmer, one hell of a markswoman, and had projects she was actually interested in. You didn’t come across phantasmagorical sea creatures on a run-of-the-mill sample collection voyage. And you certainly didn’t get mermaids stowing away on your boat.

Cue Alex’s search-and-question adventure this evening.

The sky remains cloudless, streaked navy, like her favored denim jacket. She spots two bright lights beneath the water and pauses in her paddling, course-corrects, following the mysterious gold as it drifts along the current, closer to the cliffs, toward the shadows of the caves. And then she hears it.

Haunted. Chilling. Gorgeous.

It sounds like _safety_.

Safety and security, for Kara, for her team members, for J’onn from further Naval investigation, even for her mother, if something should ever happen to Alex on a mission. It sounds like safe journeys, warm nights rocking in the berth with someone’s arms wrapped around her. It sounds as good as hot toddies at Christmas taste. It sounds like tight hugs that hurt, like someone holding her close who can’t bear to let her go. It sounds like symphonies, like strings and woodwinds and the deep, resonant chords from a melancholy piano, a bassoon, a tuba. It’s every sound all at once, rock music on summer highways, Jeremiah on his acoustic, sighing angels, the motor churning, echoing whistles in wet caves—waves, perpetual, constant, lapping against the shore and chasing the stern of the _Alura_ as Alex sets sail with someone holding her hand.

It’s ethereal. Infallible. It’s everything Alex has ever wanted, from that body, that mouth, those lips, rising out of the water before her.

The woman in the water dares to swim closer. Waves crescendo but that _voice_ , sumptuous and intimate as it flows in Alex’s ears, swirls in her head, traps her as securely as a whirl pool. She’ll never be free of it, not now that she’s heard her every desire manifested in its melody.

_Come with me, Alex_ …

Does she sing it?

This woman in the water is familiar in ways Alex cannot articulate. She’s always known her, has always seen those hypnotic, golden eyes flashing in her dreams. Alex could love her. All she wants is to keep that woman, that _song_ , completely, utterly safe.

_Come with me, Alexandra Danvers..._

The song is not selfish, not doubtful, not undeserving or second-best or inferior in anyway. It’s just hers, something of her own, something beautiful to possess, no imperfections, no cracks, no self-doubt. This song is unique as Alex is, beautiful as Alex is, lovable in a way Alex never feels she can be.

Stubborn legato rhythms beat against her ear canals like a thunderous squall. The notes are tough, strong, secure enough to take a beating. To withstand winds, criticisms, punches, doubts, fears, bullets, hurricane force spinning. Every blow that would do any of her loved ones harm can’t stand against this song, _Alex’s song_ ; it bears them and rebuffs them like a war shield. Her aria of selflessness.

Deserving, meritorious, worthy—everything Alex has ever wanted to be. It doesn’t feel real, this rapturous anthem, strong and vulnerable and caring to the point of injury. Yet it feels as real as the singing woman’s hand crawling up her bare arm.

When had she gotten so close to the woman? When had she paddled into the shadows of the caves?

Skin against hers, dissolving her worries, absolving her fears and putting her unsteady conscience to easy, deserving rest.

_Alexandra, come here..._

Alex recognizes that she’s on the water still, bobbing up and down, forty yards from the shoreline. She sees that the natural light has faded. No light, save from her board, from the moon, from this woman’s glowing golden eyes. The light has faded. Alex can’t focus. She doesn’t care.

Water drips against her shoulder and Alex feels those cool fingers caress her skin. The singer cradles Alex’s neck in her palm. A dark-headed woman with eyes bright as stars, a streak of white at her temple, a jaw strong enough to calm a tropical depression…

God, she’s gorgeous, but that’s not the half of it.

She keeps _singing_.

She sings with the strength of the rip tide. Her skin is shell-white on the water, like the moon bleached her skin. She sings and sings and sings all of Alex’s doubts to death. She puts voice and lyric to Alex’s strongest desires, as if she, some woman from the sea, could fulfill every one. Alex shudders at the hand on her neck, running along the elastic strap of her suit. Alex feels something else low, steaming and erupting in her gut: this woman knows her intimately.

Instead of criticizing Alex for what she wants, this woman pushes those wishes toward the bright life above the surface so that Alex can finally see them, so that she can recognize and claim them as her own. Victory in battle. Scientific achievements. Her mother’s acceptance. Kara’s safety. J’onn’s happiness.

A safe, strong love of her own. Hers. No one else’s.

This woman sings for Alex. Only for Alex, and it’s so dazzling Alex cannot help but cry in the moonlight. The sky is clear but she feels thunder, feels the change in her so suddenly it’s as if she never knew love until this lyric.

Alex watches the notes float from the woman’s lips like a dragon’s steamy breath. The words are a whisky rainbow, flaming, airy flutterings the color of an oil slick against the night. Alex grasps helplessly at the colors but she cannot hold the song, was never meant to hold it… was she meant to hear it? She gropes but can’t latch onto anything. Nothing, save the woman’s cool cheek, her strong, sculpted chin, her jaw hollowing and forming the refrain to that sweet, sad song.

Alex’s song.

_Keep singing_ ,

Alex says, dipping down to take the song from the woman’s lips. To join in the chorus.

_Keep singing forever,_

Alex begs when the notes stop, when her lips meet the woman’s, when the song keeps drowning out all of her other thoughts. Her own hand on the siren’s cheek, a foreign hand on the back of her neck, salty, chilly, perfect lips humming into her mouth, singing the song of her formation with the ocean’s kiss. That song, only for Alex. This woman, only, only for Alex. This kiss, hers to revel in and keep close in a way nothing else has ever been.

She never wants the lullaby to end. Alex wants these lips, moving against her own, pushing as insistently as the trade winds—she wants them all for herself. Alex wants these lips to sing her to sleep every night, wants this woman to hold her safe the way the melody holds all of her most desperate desires together. She wants to drown in this song.

Alex _knows_ this song. She pulls away from the kiss and opens her mouth, sings softly, words she doesn’t know, words she can’t help but understand. She tries to mumble along, harmonize on the lower third. But when she adds her own voice, breathy and hesitant, the woman’s song skitters. The song falters, a hitch in the wave with two voices now, until Alex once again moves into those beautiful sounds…

This kiss tastes like safety on the open water. Like love and freedom and contradiction. Like wind against her wet cheeks when she rides a curling wave. A cool tongue, cool lips, wet, deft mouth, undulating against Alex’s clumsy returns. Alex follows where the song leads, sinks into it, allowing the ocean to swallow her whole. She could struggle, but what good would it do? The song might stop. With the surface disappearing above her and the woman pulling her further and further into the deep, dark melody, Alex thinks drowning just might be worth it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and besides
> 
> you breathe differently down here.

Astra has lived a long, long time.

And in that long, long time, she can count on her hand the number of people whom she has lured into her trap with such ease. There is normally some hesitation, some understanding that her song is unnatural to the human species. No one has ever come so willingly before, as if her prey had already succumbed to her, known her, and resolved his or her fate to the tune.

That’s how it’s been for a long, long time.

But in that long, long time, not one human has ever joined her in the song. The song she knows by virtue of her species. Humans sometimes don’t even recognize it as song, let alone add their voice to the call.

Whether by telepathy or enchantment, every human’s song is unique to them. Both bait and trap, Astra uses melody to discover the most intimate desires of those she wishes to lure. Her voice is characteristic of her kind, the susceptibility of the humans something of a defense mechanism for merfolk. But she has nothing to fear from this woman, not from her superficial peek at the woman’s memories, her aura, her self. If anything, this woman and Astra are more alike than any creature that Astra has come across in her centuries, in her leagues and fathoms of travel. Even though it belonged to this woman, this _Alexandra Danvers_ , Astra had sung the call with an uncommon confidence.

Mermaids are not lured in by song and sound, but if they were, Astra imagines her own song would have resembled the one she just sang.

The thought is unsettling.

This woman she’s dragging underwater, Alexandra Danvers, who’d approached her atop some floating bit of plastic and wave, added harmonies that meshed as securely as the woven fibers of a net. Alex sang just the slightest bit lower, the alto to Astra’s mezzo, the support to Astra’s powerful assault. Oh, she wishes her culture were still thriving, so that she could consult the Oracle for advice concerning this feeling.

Does it have something to do with the strange visions in her dreams?

Or why Alexandra Danvers fell prey to the song so swiftly?

And why is Astra’s stomach flipping like guppies among the reefs?

This human had kissed her as if she had known her song. Has that happened before to a merperson? What of this _Alexandra_ must Astra take and ruminate over, what must she learn? Some woman content to follow a mermaid, a woman so desperate to ensure the safety of her loved ones that her song was sung for others and hardly for herself. A woman who feels unworthy, despite the snippets Astra felt of her heroic actions. Alexandra could be a dynamic, heralded hero, like those of ancient legends. Was there not a human of legend or history—never mind the distinction, to merfolk they are one and the same—called Alexandra the Great? Was this woman named for greatness? Astra can never forget that song, not now that she has sampled this human’s memories, her deeds, her beauty.

And yet this Alex feels inferior...

Such complexity in such a weak species, Astra muses.

Astra nearly reconsiders that _weak_ modifier, for the song hit Astra far too close to her home waters. She sang it with an irrepressible strength that startled her, as if the notes had always been pasted to her rib cage, just waiting to climb out. As if it had taken facing this woman, hundreds of years down the line, to loosen it from its bindings and drag its way up her trachea, in her mouth and over her lips, as if it took this specific audience for her to undergo this revelation. Was this another reason for the pull toward these beaches, the Oracle prompting her further inland, toward the _Alura_ , toward that rocky outcropping…

Toward Alex?

It was mournful, that song. The saddest she’s ever sung.

And Alex’s lips had brushed her own with the same eagerness Astra had shown above the water, stoking an infuriating heat Astra had never felt before. It is all rather confusing.

She breaks the surface of the water and takes one powerful stroke toward the rocky shelf at the back of the cave, using her impressive strength to pull Alex atop the stone. The plastic board pops up with a splash and settles against the water surface, bobbing benignly behind her as she struggles with Alex’s limp body. She tears the black string from Alex’s ankle and presses a few times against her chest, waits, knowing it won’t be long now.

She’s freed most all her victims from her lure. Seafarers who have desired treasures and wealth, health and immortality, lust and love, have all fallen prey to her song, to her lips—on occasion, the blade of her knife. Astra is not cruel, but rather strategic. When the prey is no longer useful, she releases the humans to their own sorry fates. But a song of hope? Of longed for, sought after safety? For such a studious and combative woman to desire such safety for her loved ones and not for herself was…unexpected; thus the woman would likely be more difficult to release once plied for information.

_Alexandra_ lay clad in green and black string and lycra fabric to Astra’s immediate right, sprawled atop the damp rock within the cave Astra had commandeered for her own use. Astra finds her form quite fit for a human, a strong grip, lithe musculature, a physicality that required maintenance. She shuts her eyes and tries to forget the taste of Alex’s lips, the vision she saw when they connected—or perhaps not a vision, a memory, of a war fought long ago.

It is hard to tell now, that fickle foresight cropping up now more than it ever has before. When she closed in on these beaches. When she felt the tug of the _Alura_. And another instance of the vision, kissing Alex.

Then again, the number of disgusting humans she’s kissed in her lure has multiplied to far more than Astra would like to admit to, but this woman, with a connection to Kara… she might have triggered something in that vision. That vision of terror, where Astra was fighting for her life as she did so long ago. It is no wonder that Alex’s song was a song of safety, if she had even the briefest glimmer of what Astra saw.

Alex complemented, supplemented, and wanted that safety as desperately as Astra did. Wanted it for the same _being_ Astra did. But truthfully, that discovery shouldn’t astonish Astra; of course fighters desire safety above all else. Just because Astra engages in combat doesn’t mean she isn’t frightened. She was frightened for Alura, once upon a time, for Kara, for her troops… less so for herself. Astra gets over the fear and continues, yet still desires that safety more than anything.

As does Alex.

How could this phenomenon occur? What does Astra know of this woman besides her mysterious connection to Kara? Or that her lips have made Astra feel things that she has not felt in her centuries of living? Or that her voice, untrained but lovely, tough and raw, melded with her own as easily as wave met shore?

Alex finally coughs, spatting up water against the rock as Astra looks on nonchalantly, still fascinated more than worried over this curious human who dared seek her out after her morning on the rocks, after her infiltration of the boat, after her discovery of Kara’s involvement in her life. Astra has her arms crossed over the edge of the rock that she’s thrown Alex on top of, her chin propped on her folded hands.

She is amused at the way this woman lies helpless before her, a few inches from her face.

Astra dodges the spittle from another coughing spell when Alex begins hacking severely.

“You are awake,” Astra remarks.

“You… you….” Alexandra pants, spasming as she attempts to gather herself even though she is at a significant disadvantage. She rolls to her side and heaves water against the dark, mossy rock, gripping onto it as if it might preserve her life. Thankfully, from luck or erosion or some other fortuitous factor, the cave’s western ceiling sustained some kind of blow, large enough for its interior to be exposed to the elements. Moss and flowering vines hang over the edges of the hole like curtains blocking the circumference of the spotlight. Nevertheless, the full, powdery moon—her Oracle’s eye—shines like a singular beam in the darkness of the cave, illuminating Alex’s terrified face.

Astra doesn’t like this part, no matter what Alura used to claim. She sighs, lifts her upper body out of the water and holds Alex’s wiggling torso down, pressing the knife of sharpened tooth close to the woman’s throat.

“You… were the one on m-my b-boat,” Alex says. She sucks breath into her lungs as she lies helpless on the moss-covered rocks. She’s panting, shivering, her teeth chattering from the drenched coolness of stone.

Astra continues, nonplussed.

“Yes,” Astra says, pressing the knife further into that unblemished skin. “You have something I want.”

Alex eyes her warily, but doesn’t crumple in the face of certain death.

“I was unaware that I’d taken anything from you,” Alex answers, her eyes flickering between the knife and Astra’s unfeeling, reserved expression. “I don’t welcome that kind of intrusion on the boat.”

“My search was no less intrusive than your tongue in my mouth,” Astra purrs, pushing Alex’s shoulder further against the rock, feeling the grinding of bone-in-socket. Alex grits her teeth but doesn’t whimper.

Astra tells herself she’s not impressed.

“Listen, unless you’re looking for some sponge samples from the reef north of here, I didn’t take anything!”

“Kara,” Astra says, releasing some of the pressure on the woman’s shoulder. Astra can feel Alex relax a little beneath her fingers. “You know her. I saw the photograph… tell me where she is.”

“Not with a knife at my throat,” Alex gulps, training those sorrowful brown eyes on Astra as if they could do her harm, as if they could render her powerless.

Astra cocks a brow but lowers her knife nonetheless, cursing the human and her song. A song so staggeringly similar to her own. Astra has to tamp down the urge to press her lips back against Alexandra’s to see if her vision will solidify more clearly… and yes, admittedly, though myth and legend might purport the contrary, she has been left rather _affected_ by her human counterpart. She tries not to think about how that pleasant stimulation has never occurred before, how fate seems to be foisting this woman upon her.

“I need to see her,” Astra tries. She sits up, still on her guard, her tail flopped over the side of the rocky ledge. The cool water hits her scales and she can feel something pulling, something powerful, tugging her back into the deep.

It feels ominous.

Like a warning.

“Why?” Alex pants, pushing up against Astra’s hold on her shoulder. She grips Astra’s forearm and surveys her body with all the professionalism of a physician—clinical, methodical, searching for any irregularities, barring the one rather large deviation from a typical human form. “You’re… the tail is the wrong color, but… oh my god,” Alex gasps, her grip on Astra’s wrist loosening, half a grin pulling at the edge of her kiss-swollen lip.

“Alura?”

Astra feels her own shoulders tense, cannot work out why she feels simultaneously perplexed and crestfallen. Her grip relaxes infinitesimally at the surprise address, giving Alex the opportunity to sit up fully.

“Alura, have you finally come to get Kara?” Alex asks, and the hope in her voice immobilizes Astra. Hope and sorrow and so many emotions Astra cannot reconcile in the hollow of her chest.

“I am not Alura,” Astra says, frowning. “But I am here for Kara.”

Alex’s eyebrows pinch together. “What happened to Al—”

“She died,” Astra cuts her off. “A very long time ago. With many others.”

“Then that must make you…Astra?” Alex guesses correctly again, flinching as Astra repositions the knife closer to her throat, no less wary despite Alex’s knowledge of her sister. Despite Alex’s knowledge of _her_.

“How do you know this?”

“Kara told me. She tells me everything.”

“Why do you have those photographs of her?”

“Why were you on my boat? Why did you wreck my cabin?”

“You seem to be under the impression this is some information exchange. Rest assured it is _not_ ,” Astra yanks Alex near enough to kiss and closes her free hand around her throat, squeezing just tight enough to threaten, yet loose enough that Alex can still speak. Astra’s voice burns when she commands: “Tell me where Kara is.”

“No,” Alex grits through clenched teeth. She stares at Astra with defiant ferocity, even in the pale moonlight, her face losing color. “You’re l-lying,” she gasps.

“Don’t test me, human,” Astra threatens, pressing the tip of the knife so hard against the front of Alex’s shoulder that a trickle of blood runs down her sternum, pools near the strap of her clothing and dribbles into her armpit.

Alex doesn’t balk. “Alura’s t-tail is blue and Astra’s i-i-is green. Yours is neither.” Astra loosens her hold a touch to let the woman talk more easily: “I’m not telling you where Kara is until I know you won’t hurt her.”

“You should not speak of things you do not understand,” Astra says, shifting her thumb and fingers into a _U_ -shape, moving her tight grip around Alex’s throat to her chin. Astra holds Alex’s face steady and her eyes gleam burnished gold once more. “Yet… I understand you, Alexandra Danvers,” Astra intones, the glow pouring from her gaze and straight into Alex’s transfixed stare. “Glimpses only, of course. Warrior. Scholar,” Astra’s grip on her chin becomes less intimidating and more gentle, a quick stroke to the soft hollow of Alex’s cheek with her index finger. “A protector. Headstrong. Occasionally rash. What is it that you want, that you most desire _,_ Alexandra Danvers?”

She hums and Alex stares, her mouth gaping slightly. Astra had hoped to subdue Alex without the song, without the influence of minor hypnosis, but Alex’s reaction is intense. Astra blinks so that Alex can remain somewhat lucid, but that doesn’t stop the human from lurching forward and pressing her mouth to Astra’s once more, cupping her face in hand to tilt Astra’s head up and into a kiss that is nothing like the slow, stuporous brush of lips from her lure. The knife pierces her flesh but Alex presses harder, her passion overriding her sense. Astra returns and hopes for another flash of vision, but Alex’s insistent presence overrides whatever minor sight she experienced earlier. There is more probing tongue, a bite of teeth, low hums that have nothing to do with a hypnotic song. It is frenzied, hot, consuming—a kiss unlike any Astra has ever shared with a human before.

She presses into Alex’s wandering hands and allows Alex her exploration. Just a moment’s indulgence—and there! The beast, with eyes glowing the same color as her own. But then, those damp human fingers slip behind Astra's neck and tangle in the hair at the top of her head. Astra pulls her knife-wielding hand away to balance against the rock, the dripping knife still held tightly in her grip. The other, the one that had been holding Alex’s chin so forcefully, is now sandwiched between their chests, fingers splayed over Alex’s heart, nails slightly curled into that bleeding human _skin_. She can feel Alex’s heart pumping, drumming, insistent and powerful and oh-so-foreign from her own. A moan echoes through the cave, and Astra tenses when Alex clasps the object on her head and yanks it away. Alex rakes Astra’s upper lip with her teeth before pulling back, opening her eyes, and glaring at Astra with utter contempt.

“Drop the knife and get off of me.”

Astra feels the kinetic force of her muscles shift, feels her sense of self slowly deteriorate under Alex’s command.

_No, no please, not again—_

The knife clatters against the rock as Astra moves back into the water, trying to escape.

_Oh no._

_Gods, Holy Oracle please…_

“Get up here on the ledge and don’t try to swim away. Don’t move from this spot. Answer truthfully when I ask you a question,” Alex commands, her steadfast gaze locked on Astra’s face. “And please don’t try to drown me again… or stab me—you know what, just don’t try to kill me again with any weapon, ever.”

Astra obeys.

She obeys her every word.

“I just want to see Kara,” Astra grunts, compelled by Alex’s command to surface, to crawl like lichen upon the boulders, to sit and remain truthful throughout some brutal interrogation. Astra has known much of humankind; hopefully what Alex deems a fitting punishment will not do as much damage as others have. “Give me back my diadem and I swear upon the Oracle’s sight I will not harm you again.”

“But you’re not beyond harming others, right?” Alex asks, twirling Astra’s diadem in her hands.

“No,” Astra answers, talking as little as she can despite the enchantment of the crown forcing the truth from her lips.

“Just… sit over there,” Alex waves her hand atop one of the rocks. “I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to,” Alex says.

Astra will believe those hollow words when Alex gives her that crown back. It’s more than crest and ornament to her people.

It is _autonomy_.

Power.

“I know what this thing does,” Alex looks down at the diadem, forged silver curved with myriad lines of dipping and inclining metallic patterns, descending to a point in the middle of Astra’s forehead. The In-Ze crest is forged into both sides and practically vibrates with oceanic potential. Astra wonders if Alex can feel it as strongly as she does. “So I know you must be a little scared. But you can’t hurt anyone to get to Kara. And you definitely can’t hurt Kara. In fact… don’t hurt Kara. I’m just saying that to… to cover my bases.”

“What are you prattling on about?” Astra murmurs, feeling the change begin, sitting this long atop the rock without the water around her. She rotates her neck and feels her gills collapse in on themselves. Her hips are next, the flaring fin retracting and smoothing into rounded flesh, powerful thighs splitting from her tail’s trunk. Alex has averted her eyes for the moment, twirling the crown in her hands as she sits at the edge of the rock, splashing her feet in the water.

Blood trickles down her chest in the moonlight as she runs her fingers over the points and depressions of Astra’s diadem. Sitting so calmly, unassuming, scrutinizing the crown with attentive study… it seems so alien to Astra, this strange, strong woman.

A woman who took her _crown._

“I just want to make sure you tell me the truth,” Alex says, throwing a cautious look over her shoulder. “I don’t want to see Kara hurt.”

“Neither do I,” Astra responds.

“What’s you name, then? The truth, remember?”

“I am not likely to forget, since you commanded it,” Astra snarks back, huddling her knees against her chest, dipping her head low in disgrace. “I told you. My name is Astra In-Ze. Second Daughter of the In-Ze House, former Praetor of the Kryptonian Guard. I am kith and blood to Kara Zor-El.”

“What do you want with her?”

“To hug her,” Astra says, and it is a desire that even she did not fully recognize until she was commanded to speak the truth. “I… that is…” Astra knows that is not all she wants from Kara, but perhaps it is the strongest wish, the most immediate, the first thing she wants to do when reunited with Kara after so many lonesome, dreadful years. Hugs afford simplicity that explanations and apologies and justifications never can, so that’s what she wants to start with. A hug. A smile. Rocking her beloved niece in a secure embrace.

All of the words can come later.

“What?” Alex asks. “You want to hug her?”

“I’ve not seen her in a dozen of your years,” Astra counters. “Of course I want to hug her.”

“That is significantly less nefarious than I suspected.”

“Not all sea creatures are out for blood,” Astra sneers.

“Coulda’ fooled me,” Alex turns, lifting a thumb to the wound near her shoulder and wiping the blood from her chest.

“You tricked me,” Astra says.

“You weren’t exactly fighting me off.”

“I believed you had fallen to the lure.”

“Says the willing participant.”

“Continue with your questioning. We will achieve nothing arguing,” Astra mutters, propping her chin against the crossed arms atop her knees. She would rather Alex think her attracted to a human than let slip any information about the visions. Kept secrets are worth minor embarrassments.

The corner of Alex’s mouth tilts up infinitesimally. Though why the woman acts amused, Astra cannot fathom. She can’t seem to get a handle on Alex despite knowing her song with such a surety. That’s usually an advantage for her kind, but Alex Danvers knows things about her, too. Knows about Alura, enough to name the boat after her. Knows of her changed tail, from green to darkest obsidian…enough to stand up to a knife at her breast. Knows Kara, darling, wonderful Kara, and surely loves her just the same if she was willing to risk the blade for Kara’s well-being. Knows enough to go for the crown, so that Astra is left at her mercy.

“Why… how… damn, I have so many,” Alex says, crawling closer to her on top of the rock. She’s within striking distance with a spear, lunging distance if Astra only had her knife back, and luring distance if Alex had not forcibly instructed her not to attack, even with her voice.

“How do you know Kara, Alexandra Danvers?” Astra pounces on the woman’s indecision, wondering if the smile was the first step to loosening the human’s tongue. “You two seemed quite close in those photographs.”

“Kara…she’s my…” she pauses, then segues in the middle of her response. “Do you know about Supergirl?”

“Yes. That’s how I’ve narrowed down the beaches. I’ve been tracking her.”

“But you haven’t found her yet.”

“She never remains in the water long enough for me to find her. News travels differently in the sea.”

“Are you going to hurt Kara?” Alex asks her.

“No. I would die for her,” Astra says. “I would kill to get to her.”

“She wouldn’t want that.”

“How is it that you know anything of her?” Astra asks, forlorn and hostile. “I ask you for your aid in this matter. Take me to her, she’s all I—”

Astra bites her tongue, digs her sharp fingernails into her forearms and squeezes, wondering if her scratches will draw blood, if she’ll bleed in recompense for the wound Alex bore. She cannot fall apart in front of this woman, cannot admit her desperation, her misery, and does not dare give voice to it for fear of granting it power over her.

“Finish that sentence,” Alex whispers.

Astra fights it. She clamps her jaws together but she can feel the compulsion building, the sick dizziness accompanying an order refused. Her stomach clenches. Her eyelids flutter. She hates feeling so weak, bereft… empty.

“She’s all I have left.”

Alex stares down at the crown again, wincing when the weight of it falls in her left hand, the hand attached to the arm attached to the shoulder that Astra had _stabbed_.

“Are you lonely, Astra?”

_Damn her._

“So lonely it consumes me,” she answers, tired of fighting it. “Lonely in the vastness of a watery world you cannot imagine. Lacking and wanting and vacant.”

“That’s… awful.”

“I do not brood over it. I prefer action.”

“What action have you been taking?”

“I’ve been searching for Kara for the last five years.”

“Five years?” Alex asks, incredulous. “How far have you—”

“The world over,” Astra interrupts. “Alura told me she would save Kara, would sacrifice her to the land to save her from the Leviathan. I was… I was imprisoned before Alura’s escape. I never knew where she had taken Kara.”

“So how did you know where to look?”

“Supergirl,” Astra answers. “As I said, news travels differently in the deep. If it hadn’t been for humanity’s complete disregard for the planet’s preservation, I would have never returned to these waters.”

“What do you mean?”

“She is in your papers, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And your papers are in the ocean. Everywhere. It did not take long for me to follow the trail, not when her family’s crest is being used to promote your disgraceful merchandising.”

“That’s not on me,” Alex says. “There’s copyright issues there I have no conception of.”

“Your explanations are meaningless to me,” Astra remarks.

“So you followed the bread crumbs?”

“What?”

“Paper trail… or maybe, current, whatever,” Alex amends, quirking an inquisitive brow toward the roof of the cave. “You’ve been all over the world looking for Kara, but what brought you to me? Why did you come to my boat?”

“I felt the call from the deep.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Alex returns, exasperated. As if she is the one being forcibly interrogated in another form. Another form that feels unnatural, irksome, like plankton are skittering over her skin and making her shiver.

“The tides stirred and the currents pulled me toward these shores. I do not expect such a feeble, logical mind to understand. Beyond that instinct, I had little evidence besides your papers.” Astra focuses accusing eyes straight at Alex, wondering if she can wring some understanding from the woman’s expression. “Yet in all my time on the sea, no captain has ever named a vessel the _Alura_.”

“Ah,” Alex says, jaw line shining in the moonlight. “That fits.”

Astra doesn’t offer any further explanation. She remains hunched over her accursed _legs_ , waiting for the moment Alex will release her back to the water. Astra observes the other woman’s frame, her behavior, the questions, her bearing. An uncommon human, certainly, especially if she knows Kara, more so since she got the better of Astra. Then again, most humans do not know that merfolk’s powers come from the crowns blessed by the Oracle. But this woman did. A woman whom Kara trusted enough to tell her about Alura and Astra both, to reveal her aquatic origin.

“Are you and Kara lovers?” Astra asks.

“What?!” Alex grimaces, her stern expression giving way to confusion and distaste. “God, no. We’re… I…” Alex inhales to settle herself, wiping again at a shoulder shedding red watercolors. “What happened to your tail?” she asks.

“I change form to suit my environment,” Astra scoffs. “You should know this, certainly, if you know the power of the diadem.”

“No that’s not… why is it black? Kara told me your tail was greener than lily pads and now…”

“I was imprisoned for a long time in a glacier to the north. My tail changed and… perhaps other parts of me.”

“You were frozen?” Alex asks, incredulous. “In a glacier?”

“For some time, actually. But thanks to you humans, I escaped. If you were not aware, many of your glaciers have been melting.”

“I’m aware,” Alex answers flatly. “ So you broke out of your prison because of global warming?”

“I am not familiar with that term.”

“The ice melted, so you got out?”

“Yes. Our tribes have always imprisoned the worst beings, creatures, and criminals of the most malevolent intent, within those ice flows. We’re able to build it from below by repurposing the dissolved oxygen not filtered by our gills—” Astra pauses, pursing her lips, puffing out a stream of frigid air into the cave. The condensating water on the cave wall behind her flash-freezes into an icy sheet. “Yet the surface water temperatures are proving too warm to keep the ice from melting, even at those depths. You wonder why Supergirl has had to fight so many creatures recently?”

“Because the prison is… melting?” Alex asks.

“Precisely.”

“But that still doesn’t explain why they put you there in the first place.”

“I was held for speaking out against the council. Speaking the truth. For going to great lengths to save my race.”

“What lengths were those?”

“I was planning to reveal our existence to the world in order to compel you humans to help us. But before I could put my plan into action, the council accused me of treason. A traitor to the race. And now…” Astra chuckles humorlessly. “There is no race to betray.”

“We’ll get back to the ‘compelling humans’ thing later, but what happened to them? Your race, I mean,” Alex pushes. “Kara doesn’t know anything except that her mother sent her away in a boat twelve years ago and never came back.”

Astra turns her head to the side, speaking toward the frozen rock wall above the water.

“They died.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

Astra blinks as memories of battle march through her vision like some bloodied cavalcade. Streams of rust-flavored heat. Swimming for her life, thrusting and stabbing and blocking and crying. Bubbles erupting from beneath rocky spires, sparks of light, a single scale as large as an orca, a pointed tail dragging against the sea floor and leaving a trench the size of several cruise ships lined prow to stern.

The deepest she’s ever swam. The deepest she’s ever fought.

“It was the Leviathan rising,” she mutters.

Silence descends over the cave for a short while. Astra wonders if this respite in the interrogation is Alex’s minor mercy, if she knows that moving forward will stir up memories best forgotten. The waves seem thunderous now when they had once been only background noise. In the darkened moonlight, the water’s shadows play at geometric design, breaking and reforming against the hardened surface of the cave’s interior. It’s soothing. Astra could watch the ocean’s silhouette flicker against the rock for hours on end. The aquatic element leaving half a shadow on the land.

Much like a mermaid.

“L-Leviathan?” Alex finally speaks, her voice wavering like the dancing shadows. “Kara said you defeated the Leviathan, but I never really… she… she thought you were fighting for her.”

“I’ve never stopped fighting for her. I never will,” Astra says, thankful for the pause in Alex’s critical scrutiny. She tells herself it’s merely the humidity of the cave, certainly not tears forming in the creases of her eyelids. “And I did defeat the Leviathan. Disabled it. Blinded it. Imprisoned it in the same glacier I was held in.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Alex argues, and Astra hears shuffling off to the side. “Come on, look at me.”

Astra feels the sinews in her neck turn from the frozen, moonlit wall, no matter how hard she tries to fight it. She swipes discreetly at her cheeks and faces Alex once again.

“Sorry, that wasn’t a command—I mean—”

Astra holds up a hand for silence.

“Your question?”

Alex settles cross-legged directly in front her. “If you imprisoned the Leviathan in the glacier, how could it have killed your people?”

“I never said it was the same Leviathan,” Astra answers, as if she were talking to a simple-minded tadpole of a merchild.

“Wait… there’s _two_?!”

“Of course there are two. How do you expect the species to breed?”

“But, come on, there can’t really… There haven’t been any sightings of the thing. It’s a myth.”

“Like merfolk are myths, Alexandra?”

“That’s not… I mean—”

“You and the council are of one mind, it would seem.”

“They didn’t believe you?”

“They believed in my scars. Believed in my mutilated and injured forces. Believed that we defeated the first monster and celebrated when we finally imprisoned it. I was…”

“You’re a hero,” Alex supplies, yet Astra does not care for the overly sentimental assessment.

“Hardly. A hero would have better words to convince her people of imminent danger.”

“They saw you fight the war against the monster but didn’t believe there was a second one?”

“We fought the first beast in the depths, so most of it went unseen. For the better, truly, I’d never want Kara to witness that. But we had already sustained such losses to our numbers. Our species has been hunted for centuries…” Astra trails off, casting her eyes toward Alex’s hands, now cradling the diadem reverently in her palms. “They did not want to believe another beast could live, though all the signs were there. I spent decades tracking the first, so I know I was not wrong. Though you must understand, a second beast guaranteed extinction. Better to silence the combat leader who had trapped the Leviathan in the first place than acknowledge her claims. It would have caused inconsolable hysteria.”

“After everything you did, they told everyone you were lying.”

“I did not lie.”

“I never said you did,” Alex returns smoothly, keeping her composure as Astra slowly comes apart. “But I still can’t believe something like that exists without us knowing about it.”

Astra suppresses another frustrated sigh.

_Humans_.

“The Leviathan is a creature of the deep. You do not have to combat it, so it is not a threat to you. But the Leviathan ravaged my home waters, and at times, even you have felt its effects. Do you believe tsunamis are mere reverberations of a volatile core?”

“Science says they are.”

“You may trust your _science_ , and I will trust my memories,” Astra says. “Waves that flatten shorelines are the result of the Leviathan breaching. It is rare, but they do surface.”

“Wait, wait, let me get this straight…” Alex says, setting the crown aside, steepling her fingers together and placing their tips at her forehead, wrinkling her face in concentration. Astra has never seen such a ritual for deep thought. Had she not been rooted to the spot, seething at the paralyzing command, she might have found the woman entertaining. “You’re saying the reason Supergirl has been so busy lately is because the polar ice caps are melting, and there’s no more merfolk to keep the prison frozen?”

“Essentially.”

“But if you imprisoned the Leviathan in the ice, that means…”

“It is only a matter of time before it escapes.”

“And if it finds the other one?”

“With no merfolk to keep them corralled to the deep, they will rise.”

A sobering notion, certainly.

“What does that mean for humanity?” Alex asks.

“That is not my concern.”

“Fine, what does it mean for Supergirl, then?” Alex snaps. “Because she’s grown rather attached to humans. Went so far as to expose herself and her origins to protect them from that sea monster crushing the research vessel.”

“I wonder why…” Astra muses, quirking her head to the side to flip-flop the questioning, placing _Alex_ under observation even if she is not compelled by the crown. “Ships sink all the time, yet Kara never interfered before. What changed?”

Alex doesn’t respond.

“You are a researcher, are you not, Alexandra Danvers of Midvale?” Astra asks. “I’ve seen your books. Your tools. Microscopes, tanks, pipettes. I have glimpsed in your mind, but I do not know you fully. So, what is it that you study?”

“That is not your concern, either.”

“Why is your ship named for my sister?” Astra asks again. “None but Kara and I keep her memory and yet you’ve named your ship after her. Is it not the same now, in your strange time, to give names to your vessels that are significant to you?”

“Look, a little cutter like that is hardly a ship.”

“Why _Alura_ then?” Astra pushes.

Alex shifts the slightest bit closer to Astra, then extends her hand. “Kara named the ship. I’ll tell you why, just… promise not to hurt anyone. On your honor as Praetor.”

Astra eyes Alex’s hand warily.

“Why not compel me to remain peaceful? You have the crown.”

“I’d rather take you at your word. Exercise a little optimistic faith in a fellow fighter.”

“Then you intend to return my crown to me?” Astra cannot help the uptick in her vocal pace, the higher pitch of her voice.

“I’m optimistic, not delusional,” Alex replies, but the hint of a smile peeks through. “You’ll get it back eventually. I’m not cruel, I know what it means to you. So consider this step one in getting it back.” Alex waves the extended limb in Astra’s sight line once more. “Come on, you can’t exactly complain that I smell like fish.”

“Why would I complain about that?”

“Uhm, because… you know what? Never mind. Do we have a deal?”

Astra takes another look at the hand before capitulating. It isn’t as if she has much choice.

Astra extends her arm and carefully slips her palm against Alex’s, squeezing as the woman moves their joined hands up and down. A strange ritual, Astra thinks, brushing her thumb over the soft skin of Alex’s knuckles. She has never been so close to a human without having an ulterior motive, without displaying outright hostility. No knife, no voice, no watery kiss of death. Alex looks up from their joined hands, squeezing tightly, as if her forthcoming information could break the nascent truce.

“She’s my sister,” Alex says, not releasing Astra’s hand.

“… what?”

“Kara,” Alex clarifies. “My family found her in the boat Alura used. Twelve years ago, and I—Kara, she… she grew up with me. Taught me things. Saved me when the research vessel went down, it’s… it’s my fault she’s Supergirl.”

Astra feels her throat close up, feels her grip tighten against Alex, feels like she’s been knocked brainless by the keel of an ocean liner.

_Sisters._

“How is it anyone’s fault that she is allowed to be who she is?” Astra asks.

“All eyes on her,” Alex says, uncertain. “If anyone finds out who she really is, everything she’s built… she’d never have a normal life again.”

“Kara is exceptional,” Astra says. “There is nothing normal or human about her. You do her a grave injustice by implying otherwise.”

After much too long, Alex finally drops her hand. The human shrugs, staring at the gaping space where they had just touched. And then… she _laughs_. Not long, not genuinely, but rather regretfully, as if she has resigned herself to a foregone conclusion, unable to stop a stream of inevitability from hurtling over a cliff with all the force of a waterfall.

“Where were you when I needed this talk six months ago?” Alex smirks.

“The Indian Ocean.”

“I didn’t mean—” Alex stops abruptly, then presses against the wound near her shoulder, her grin morphing to a grimace.

“I wish I had known what you were to Kara.” Astra reaches out and gingerly presses against the wound. “I would not have… I apologize, Alexandra.”

“Just Alex,” she corrects.

“That is not what your surface memories suggest,” Astra answers. “Your surname is Danvers, then Alexandra Rosemar—”

“Just Alex!” she says again. “Or, Agent Danvers, if you have to go formal.”

“Agent Danvers? What kind of title is that?”

“Well, you weren’t wrong about the scholar thing,” Alex answers her. “But I also work with Supergirl in a more physical—well, combative role. That’s my rank. Agent.”

“You do battle with Kara?” Astra asks, unable to contain her interest. “Fight alongside her?”

“I’m nothing like her, but I am trained in aquatic combat tactics. Or, as much as any human can be. I took down a Makara off the Pacific coast of Guatemala with a torpedo to get my promotion.”

“A Makara?” Astra’s eyebrows scuttle up her forehead like a speedy crab. “In what form?”

“Half jaguar, half tiger shark,” Alex responds. “That’s what this is from.” Alex turns to her left and there, running over her right shoulder blade, are two long silver scars stretching the length of the scapula and ending midway down her back.

Astra trails her fingers over the streaks, hurdling over the thin piece of material holding Alex’s suit in place. She lingers against the human skin, studying the minor discoloration, the streaks of newer flesh. A Makara. Difficult enough for a merperson to defeat, let alone a human. A human _by herself_. Those were the sequences of combat Astra sang in Alex’s song, instances of battle, of galloping pulses and adrenaline and the high of a mission complete.

“You are very brave,” Astra says, transfixed by the scars. “Braver than most of your race.”

Alex doesn’t acknowledge the remark, instead wincing again at the pain in her shoulder. “I need to patch this up.”

“Very well,” Astra says, withdrawing from the fascinating human. “May I move back to the water now?”

“You can get up if you want, but don’t you want to see Kara?” Alex asks.

“You’ll take me to her?!” Astra brightens, scrambling so that she stands before Alex, prepared to follow where she leads. “Are we going now? Should we wait until Oracle’s light?”

Astra watches Alex’s cheeks darken in the glow of the moonbeams.

“Uh…”

“Kara is… do you think she will remember? Certainly, she named your vessel, of course she will remember,” Astra begins pacing, shaking the legs to acclimate herself to their usage. She hopes practice will keep her from falling flat on her face when she sees Kara for the first time in over a decade.

“Astra?”

“Yes? Come, Alex. I may need your assistance with these… are they _ankles_? They don’t have near the flexibility of my fin,” Astra bends over to observe her feet, feeling Alex’s eyes on her. She stands on her left, rotating her other flexed foot to fully experience the range of motion the appendage provides. She places it down on slippery rock and intends to lift the other but stumbles in her haste, over stone and surf and her own damnable feet… directly into Alex’s outstretched arms.

She holds onto the woman’s shoulders and pulls away from the injured arm instantly, readjusting her grip as she gets her feet back underneath her.

“Forgive me, I am… I have waited so long.”

“You’re excited,” Alex says, lifting Astra so that she stands more securely on the ledge nearest the ocean. Alex runs her supportive hand over Astra’s spine and settles it against her hip, a comforting, stable presence. She watches Alex, seemingly transfixed by her own hand on Astra’s body. Astra wonders why the woman’s voice is so scratchy when she speaks: “You’re also extremely naked.”

Astra quirks her head to the side. “We are on a beach?”

“What?”

“Nudity is not indecent in your cultures at beaches. Is this not correct?”

As if Astra could be bothered to keep up with humanity’s perception of its bodies. Though with the way Alex is staring at hers, she would recommend the human make use of those charming looking glasses the species created to observe her own reflection. Astra cannot be so strange in this form that she deserves Alexandra’s roving stare.

“There are some beaches but, uh…” Alex is blinking sporadically now, as if she has too much ocean water in her eyes. “…most times you have to wear a swim suit. Or a wetsuit for… full… body…”

“Is it because you find me attractive? Foreign? Am I using the legs incorrectly?” Astra asks, kicking a flexed foot out to the side. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“It’s nothing,” Alex says quickly, turning from her, walking over the rocks towards her plastic board with the strange lights around it. “My shoulder ‘s all.”

“I can make a poultice, if it would ease your pain,” Astra follows Alex over the rocks. “You do not heal as speedily as my kind.”

“No, I’ve got the necessary stuff back at my boat, but after, we’ll have to go into the lab to see Kara.”

“What is a lab?”

“Where I work.”

“Why must we go there?”

“It’s a more controlled environment. I just think it would be easier than taking you into the city, or all three of us squeezed into the cabin of my boat. The lab is where I do the science part of my job. A lot to do with merfolk, actually. In fact, I could use your blood—”

Astra shies away.

“I thought you were a warrior.”

“Warrior,” Alex repeats, hopping down the stone stairway and into the water, strapping a black piece of fabric to that confounded _ankle._ “I kinda like that,” she says quietly, looking up at Astra all the while.

The lights around the board cast a fractured pattern against Alex’s face, and Astra momentarily wonders how she came this far: a _human_ in the water below her; and then herself, _standing_ , on legs she hardly ever uses, mere hours away from seeing Kara.

“Heads up!”

Alex tosses the diadem and Astra snatches it from the air. The strange twinges that run through her system when commanded dissipate in an instant and Astra relaxes, fixing the crown back atop her head, diving into the water. It takes seconds for her change as she somersaults with joy, then surges toward the surface and slings her hair out of her face. She wades toward Alex in the shallows and is overwhelmed with the course the eve has run.

“Thank you, Alexandra.”

“It’s Alex, remember? But you’re welcome.”

“Humans have acquired many diadems in the past,” Astra says, curling her fingers over the side of Alex’s sparkling board. “You are the only one I know of to return it without a struggle.”

Alex’s fingers brush hers on the edge of the floating plastic, and Astra feels a tiny jolt in her tail. Like an eel has floated against her. There is also a momentary flash, so brief as to seem impossible. Alura in her mind’s eye. Brief, yet clear, definitely her sister. Likely because they will first go to the boat named for her.

“I would never… there’s a difference between endangering others and forcing you to do something against your will,” Alex looks down at her, and those earth-brown eyes seem saddened once again. “Or even… stopping you from doing something you wanted to do, as long as it didn’t hurt anyone else. It’s what I did for the longest time with Kara, and it wasn’t fair to her.” Alex looks down at her plastic board, frowning in the lowlight. “Or perhaps I really am delusional.”

“You have acted as the family that Kara lost. You have studied her home, defeated a Makara, and have willingly returned my diadem.” These actions should not surprise her, knowing what she does of Alex’s song. Her favorite song, Astra decides. “You are a good human, Alexandra Danvers.”

“Ha! Seriously?” Alex chuckles. “And how many humans have you come across? Really talked to, you know?”

“I have ‘come across’ many humans,” Astra recalls armies, ships full of foul-smelling men, travelers, pirates, explorers. “But humans I’ve spoken with for such a long time… fourteen, I believe.”

“Really setting that bar high, aren’t you?”

“Pardon?”

“Just, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Alex chastises her, but the smile belies her tone. “You did stab me about fifteen minutes ago.”

“I apologized for that, but you likewise sport a robust constitution for such a pathetic species,” Astra nods, approving of her own personal assessment. “I like you.”

“I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.”

Astra smirks up at Alex, wondering if there is even more to learn of the brave creature.

“Must we dawdle here? Can we not go to Kara?”

“Gotta go to my boat first,” Alex tells her, paddling with her good arm toward the mouth of the cave. Astra swims alongside her, nudging the peculiar board of lights through the waves. Astra is distracted by her happiness, but Alex’s last whispered comment leaves her genuinely perplexed:

“Though if we don’t get you some clothes I’m never going to be able to look Kara in the eye again.”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

When she wakes, Alura stops breathing.

It requires conscious effort in this form. There’s always that moment of panic, that tight constriction around her throat, around her chest, as if she’s caught in squeezing tentacles with no means of escape. Her chest heaves, covered in a thin white sheet, wires and tubes and foreign human implements funneled into her body as if trying to suck the ocean right out of her. Some foul, pitchy bleeping echoes on her left, a syncopated rhythm that seems to match her breaths.

Alura dislikes it immensely.

The room is still around her. In the ocean, everything moves. Currents and waves and whispy tails float, hair drifts, scales shudder. But stillness means stagnation. And stagnation oftentimes means death. When the fins quit flickering, that’s when her friends have passed, when they’re tied and weighted, delivered to the Oracle’s light.

Deadly still.

She wiggles her _toes_ , those tiny extremities on the bottoms of her _feet_ that seem utterly ridiculous, not near as long as fingers, not half as dexterous, likely useless. When she and Astra had been young, before their training, they would sneak to the shore under the Oracle’s eye and change. Touch the tips of those toes, _kick_ with those feet, chucking sand into each other’s hair just to see the extent to which the legs would stretch. Astra was less concerned with the appendages than Alura, wondering why they would ever need to use them. It was less a need for fluid movement on land than it was a fascinating curiosity for Alura, like her interest in the old ways, her study of the sacred stones, her simple desire to _know_. She would oftentimes sit upon a rock, undergo the change, and poke at the shifting bone and cartilage that comprised a _kneecap_. She studied those legs just as she did the barriers, the tribes, the differing laws of the sea. The histories and rulings were so expansive she could never know it all, could never learn everything there was to know, but that didn’t stop her from trying.

Human histories, cultures, environments, however… she never quite had the chance to learn.

Things are clear and white here.

Bizarre, unusual devices that make sounds when they shouldn’t flare to life with light, smell unpleasant and look utterly horrifying. She is covered in white, a garment of some kind, flung over her chest and partially draped over her arms. It covers her torso and dives down beneath the edge of the sheet covering her lower half. She’s seen humans in a variety of raiment but it all feels _constricting_. Alura shifts to her side to look around but feels an ache low across her abdomen, then remembers with startling clarity her morning on the beach with—

_Lucy_.

Alura pushes against the pain in her abdomen to sit up, finding a sleeping Lucy in a chair next to a windowed wall that does not reveal the ocean, the outdoors, or even the beach, but another white washed corridor. Alura gulps uncertainly. Lucy has changed from the wet attire she first approached Alura in, trading those cut-off _shorts_ for long black pants and _boots_ to cover her feet. In fact, the woman wears all black. The material seems to swallow her, curled up as she is in that chair, her head slung across the shoulder she has propped on the back of the furniture.

Such an intriguing human. Unphased by the discovery of a mermaid—a very _human_ looking mermaid, much to Alura’s displeasure.

Her legs feel weighty as a Beluga.

She wants to rise, wants to _swim_ , wants to get out of this dry _air_ and into a bay or an inlet or back to her ocean. But her diadem is gone. Her abdomen hurts more than any injury she’s ever sustained. She tries to recall what happened, whether she ran into some predator, or swam into the bottom of some man-made hazard. So many injuries can occur in the ocean and without her crown, Alura realizes just how defenseless she is. Never mind the loss of her powers, or the healing waters, but her mind, her memory…

Gone.

She can’t remember being swept ashore.

She can’t remember how she lost her diadem.

She can’t remember the last time she well and truly remembered anything.

Alura stretches atop the bed and whimpers, the ache in her lower abdomen burning and severe. She’s able to push the garments and blankets down to get a look at her stomach, unsettled to find a patch of white gauze half a foot square pasted to her body. She rips at the adhesive edges, bites her lips to keep from crying out, and finally gasps when she sees the red, puckered skin knit together with revolting black stitching. The tears sting and the incision hurts, but that pain is nothing compared to the unwelcoming sterility of this human environment. She moves again and the terrible machine beeps louder, shrill as seagulls. She yanks at everything: clothing, wires, bedding, kicking slightly with her confounded _legs_. The beeping crescendos to a consistent blare of sound.

But now she’s escaped that infernal bed and climbed to her feet, her attention focused on finding an exit.

She limps toward the doorway as Lucy stirs, and Alura is both frightened and hopeful she’ll wake. Frightened, for she wants to leave this awful, close place with _walls_ and _doors_ but likewise hopeful, Lucy being the only bit of familiarity she can latch onto in this peculiar human _building_.

Alura looks out the door and sees several humans stomping along in formation near the end of the corridor. She wants to go, wants to leave, wants the _water_ , but how far can she make it with this throbbing in her side?

The beeping finally wakes Lucy. Alura observes as the woman spins her head about, taking in the scene near the bed, the machines, the significant lack of a _body_ in the bed, and leaps to her feet, scrambling toward the bed. Stops cold. Still seems confused. She turns and catches Alura standing at the door, looking hesitantly out into the hallway.

“Alura?”

“What’s happening to me?” Alura asks, whispers, fears, falling against the side of the doorway and slumping toward the ground. Bringing her legs beneath her hurts more than insistent waves tossing her body against a cliff face, but she feels so uncertain, so overwhelmed, she forgets to breathe in this body—

“Alura, Alura!” Lucy rushes toward her and crouches, reaching one cautious hand forward. “Alura, take one deep breath through your mouth, okay?”

Alura shuts her eyes and dips her head forward, her hands floating to her injured side of their own accord.

“Alura! You’ve got to breathe.”

“Take—take me—”

“I’m sorry, Alura, listen, we can’t take you anywhere. Too many drugs in the system and they’re monitoring your vitals for the next forty-eight hours.”

Alura can’t form words, her chest _burns_ like those underwater reactions of molten riffs in the ocean floor, the heated water near the forges Astra finds so fascinating.

“Listen, you’ve just come out of some major surgery, okay?”

She’s not certain of everything Lucy’s telling her, but finds herself unable to ask questions. Astra would scoff, would needle Alura about that curious streak that had once found her armed with nothing more than a carved stone, floating between the front lines of two combative species. Alura feels as though she’s lost her curiosity along with her diadem, along with her memories, along with her _tail_. She wishes she had the energy to thrash.

“Alura… let’s get you back to the bed, okay?”

“Ocean…” Alura manages through inconsistent _breaths_. “Please t-take me back to the o-ocean.”

“You can’t get wet.”

“What?!” Alura doesn’t mean to snap, but it’s harsh as a thunderclap.

“Your injury, your stitches. Your incision needs to heal, and it won’t if you get it wet.”

“How utt-utterly ridiculous,” Alura gasps, though with human anatomy, or, more appropriately, her _acting_ human anatomy, Alura cannot see much other option. She’ll remain with Lucy as long as she can, as long as it takes for her side to heal and return her mobility, as long as it takes for her to _remember_.

“What’s going on here?” another woman, short hair, dark eyes, taller than Lucy. “Why is she out of bed?”

“I fell asleep,” Lucy explains, and Alura feels the weight of guilt push her harder into the tile floor and wooden doorjamb. “Sorry.”

“Just… let’s get her back and redress the wound.”

The woman stoops to take Alura’s arm but she flinches at the touch, her gaze unable to completely focus on either of the two hovering humans.

“Alura,” Lucy says gently, “This is Dr. Vasquez. She’s the lead doctor on your case, performed the surgery for you.”

“What? What is… surgery?”

Lucy stares back, her nose’s edge scrunched to the side, lips pursed in thought, keeping a light hand on Alura’s kneecap. “Your healing properties don’t extend to this form, is that correct?”

“It would seem so,” Alura concedes, finally getting her breathing under control.

“Humans have found ways to repair themselves, to… heal themselves through external influence. We cannot self-repair like the merfolk. Our healing comes from herbs, medicines, procedures, and that’s how we had to help you,” Vasquez explains, crouching down, both elbows propped on her knees. The hem of her coat dusts the tile floor beneath her black-booted feet. It is white as well.

“These… stitchings?” Alura asks, skimming tentative fingers over the raised skin of the incision. “You sewed me up like one of your human garments…”

“It was all we could do for a wound so deep,” the Vasquez woman answers. “Do you remember… did someone attack you?”

“I don’t know,” Alura confesses, feeling rather overwhelmed by the memory loss. “I can’t remember… I’ve lost my diadem.”

“That doesn’t explain why you can’t shift back,” Vasquez tells her.

“What do you know of our people?” Alura questions.

“A lot more than you think I do,” Vasquez nods, grinning reassuringly. “And enough to patch you up. Agent Lane here is still learning.”

“Agent…? What is this title?”

“That’s my working title here at the Department of Extranormal Oceanography,” Lucy chimes in. “We work with all kinds of beings in the sea. If they’re posing a threat to humanity, and conversely, if humans pose a threat to them, that’s where we mediate. Though it’s not just merfolk, but we are trying to learn everything we can.”

Alura finds such study surprising, especially for a species who—over the past two centuries—has slowly consigned her people to the sphere of myth. Lucy’s eyes are soft and unassuming underneath the harsher lighting; her clothing black, easier on Alura’s adjusting eyes; her demeanor relaxed, encouraging, hedged with carefully contained worry. Her head is tilted slightly in observation and Lucy looks older, somehow, aged as Alura’s people are, as if she has seen many places, many species, and has looked at them all with this self-same reassurance. Alura watches Lucy give a minor nod to Vasquez, who departs momentarily to check the machines near the bed.

“The Director has put me on your case since I found you first,” Lucy explains, pointing toward the hand Alura has wrapped over her stitched wound. “Why don’t we get you back in the bed, and I’ll walk you through everything.”

“Pardon? Walk… walk me through a…?”

“I’ll tell you what we know about your injury, and then you can tell us what you remember, okay?”

“It does sound like the most reasonable course of action, though I don’t feel like I have much choice.”

“We just want to make sure your injury has been treated correctly. When I found you in the water this morning, you were already in this form,” Lucy looks across the room at the _doctor_ , the woman preoccupied with rearranging the bedding and twisting knobs and pressing buttons from those thrumming machines. “Vasquez tells me that’s irregular. So Alura, if you can’t change back, why not stay in the place we can treat you? I don’t want to frighten you, but we found you along our coastline, our shores, our jurisdiction. We technically have the right to hold you here.”

Alura doesn’t like the way that sounds. She scowls, but Lucy offers her a guileless smile to combat the tension.

“But I’d much rather you feel comfortable than compelled,” Lucy tells her, motioning for Vasquez’s help. The doctor returns and Alura is eased to her to her feet (despite the scorching pain shooting across her abdomen).

“I’m very sorry to put you through all this, but we don’t know enough about you to let you go just yet,” Lucy tells her calmly. “What if we do, and your injury opens back up? What if it gets infected? Worse, what if the person who did this to you comes back and tries something else once they see we’ve fixed this?”

“All valid points…” Alura concedes, settling back on the edge of the bed. “Though I almost… I think…” Alura shuts her eyes, the flashes of familiarity tickling at the back of her brain despite that seasick feeling she gets when she’s under the influence of another’s command. “I feel… I think I’ve been forced to forget.”

“Forced?” Lucy asks, propping her hands on her petite hips. “How can you be ‘forced’ to forget something?”

“My diadem,” Alura tells her, “Or, crown, I think, is what you humans call them. You said something about the my crown earlier at the beach, Lucy.”

“I’m going to lift your gown up, okay?” Vasquez tells her. “I need you to lean back a bit so I can secure the bandages.”

Alura props her weight back on her hands, shutting her eyes to see if that niggling feeling in her body can be suppressed. She thinks, thinks _hard_ , tries to recall her last memory—floating on the cross current that would take her north for her yearly visit to the glacier, to see if she could make further progress. She finally thought she’d be able to burn through the last of the thick ice sheets to free her sister, but… something stopped her. The ice was cracking, she felt she could see Astra, she could tell her about the… tell her about… what was it she needed Astra for? She had seen something? Witnessed an attack, or an incident or—no, it felt more real than mere observation, it felt like experiencing the pain, the uncertainty, the rage and the brokenness of a wild thing tamed despite its nature. Forced to bow to a hand that didn’t fit, a master who wielded a power improperly.

Why did it feel so wrong? As if Alura herself had been violated?

She jerks to the side when Vasquez presses against the swollen flesh of the wound.

Perhaps Alura had been violated… if only she could recall.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Vasquez says, extracting a small tube with a light at the end, moving toward Alura’s visual field. “This’ll be bright, okay?” the light flashes in her eyes, and Alura feels the skin of her lids pulled back for inspection. “Yeah, the diadems, there’s something of a metaphysical link between the crowns and the anatomies of the merfolk. Control the crown, control the mermaid. So, theoretically, if someone’s taken Alura’s crown and forced her to forget the stabbing and… even more than that, then she has no choice. It’s not that she doesn’t want to answer the questions, it’s that she can’t.”

“How do you know so much of my people?” Alura asks Vasquez. The woman is deft and careful with her movements, though no more remarkable than the next human.

“Supergirl works with us,” Vasquez says. “We get so much of our information from her, but she did bitch about the MRI.”

“Susan,” Lucy chides.

“Supergirl? Who is Supergirl?” Alura asks.

“Supergirl,” Lucy starts, “is the mermaid who’s been fighting the sea creatures. Serpents, a cthulhu, Iku-Turso… she surfaced about, six months ago I think?”

“Sea creatures?” Alura hones in on any information regarding a mermaiden-turned-warrior. “And you’re certain it’s a mermaid? She fights them?”

“Contains them,” Lucy corrects. “If they’re hurting humans, or trying to sink boats, or that one massive squid that tried to take down the oil rig—”

“Does she look like me?” Alura cuts Lucy off. “Exactly like me? But white in her hair—here?” Alura can hear the desperation in her voice, but she cannot contain it. She knows that survivors were few and far between after the second Leviathan’s final attacks; and the only merperson who would do battle with those beasts was frozen, caught up in a prison to the north.

But perhaps all of her covert attempts at releasing Astra had not been in vain?

Not if Astra was—

“No,” Lucy says. “She’s blonde, about as tall as you, I guess. Although,” Lucy furrows her brow, her eyes scanning Alura’s face in critical study. “There might be some resemblance—then again, you’re both mermaids.”

“I’ve never heard of this ‘Supergirl’. I thought perhaps it might be my sister.”

“You have a sister?” Vasquez asks, moving toward the end of the bed and grabbing a stack of papers attached to a board. “I’m going to add that to your medical chart.”

“A twin, yes,” Alura answers. “That’s why… well,” Alura gestures toward herself. “I had wondered if this Supergirl might have been her.”

“You remember you have a sister, at least,” Lucy remarks.

“Of course I remember her,” Alura says. “I… things were so fuzzy this morning, but it’s just the attack. I know of my history, my people, m-my family.”

She puts her hand over her mouth and bows her head, trying not to think of Zor-El, crushed beneath the tail of the beast, of her friends, Lara and Corsica, Raz-Sur and his cousin, Tam-Sur. All gone, swept away by the Leviathan’s claw. She had missed the final attack by happenstance, setting off secretly toward the northern waters, to Astra, to bring her back and seek out refuge from the single remaining tribe of merfolk near the Great Reef of the South. After several hours swimming, she had to turn round, the spiked pick she always used against the outer layers of ice forgotten atop a rocky platform due to her hasty departure. But as she swam closer toward her homewaters to retrieve the tool, she could feel the trembling ocean shelf, catch the flashes of light, smell the sulfurous scent of thermite, that paradox of water burning. Lying in wait like a coward, she eventually returned to mourn her husband, her friends, and dealt with a self-loathing and guilt so acute she could not stomach it, thinking how lucky she had been to send Kara away—gone but alive—how Astra’s imprisonment had kept her sister out of the Leviathan’s fatal clutches.

And if the northern currents had not called her that day… she might have still been with her surviving tribe, might have experienced the same fate. Once she had salvaged what was left of her home, Alura resolved to return to the glacier again. It was not the first time she had made the journey north alone, but it was the first time she had done so knowing she had nothing to return to. So perhaps when the ice was melting, as she pushed the burning beams from her vision too hot too fast… perhaps she had blacked out. It had happened the first year, unaccustomed as she was to using the sight for such a purpose. It took dozens of merfolk quite some time to freeze the creatures and prisoners deeply enough in the glacier; one mermaiden would not make a significant dent in yards upon yards of ice at her pace. Any more often than a single annual visit, and she could go blind. The remaining few counselors might have noticed her absence, and she could’ve been sentence to the same suspended state as her sister. Helping no one, least of all her people.

But this time… this time she could see her sister’s form through the ice—and there were no counselors left to hold her accountable for a prison break. Alura had worked the pick against the block of ghastly cold, the white opacity growing clearer, just enough for Alura to catch a glimpse of a torso. _Astra_. So why, why could she not remember how she had gotten all the way back down to the middle waters, washed upon a shore where some surviving mermaid had taken to heroics to protect the humans?

Alura moves her hands from her trembling mouth upwards, attempting to block out the harsh light.

“It’s okay. You can take your time.” She hears Lucy’s voice go breathier, but it’s closer, the vibrations comforting, waves of sound at least something like her waves of water.

“The last thing I remember,” Alura thinks, pressing hard into the side of her head. Astra flashes to the fore of her mind’s eye, not swimming this time but instead walking, walking on _legs_ , down a bright hallway. She’s clad in all black like Lucy, her expression neutral, unruffled, stoic, but… she’s walking directly towards Alura.

“I was trying to free my sister,” Alura manages. “I had set out early, swimming north. I do it once a year because my eyes can’t… they burn out and I cannot recover.”

“Your eyes?” Vasquez asks, looking down to the chart in her hand. “Do they emit the heat beams like Supergirl’s?”

“I don’t know why they wouldn’t, if she is of the sea, as you say. Our eyes adjust to the darkness in the depths, the coolness… our eyes can burn for a short time. Hypnosis, heat…” Alura trails off momentarily, thinking of the few times she’d sung her lure on a dare from her sister. “My sister was in the glacier but she… she fought…” Alura knows how strange this must sound, judging by the human’s perplexed faces. “I was trying to free her. My eyes…”

“We’re familiar with those heated merfolk stares.”

Alura and the two women turn to the door at the sound of the deep voice. Alura sees a dark-skinned man wearing black, standing with his arms crossed at the threshold.

“Alura,” Lucy says, indicating the approaching man. “This is my superior, Director Henshaw. He’s in charge of the DEO.”

“Vasquez says she got you in and out of surgery quickly enough,” he says briskly, as if checking her health off a list he needs to complete. He stands tall and tense, jaw hard, unrelenting stare. “Though we need to find who or whatever caused that stab wound before it strikes again.”

“We were just getting to that, sir,” Lucy offers. “You said you were trying to free your sister, right Alura? The story’s been a little disjointed, what with the memory loss. But I’ve gathered that her sister was imprisoned in… ice? Somewhere?”

“That’s correct,” Alura says, unable to tear her eyes away from the male human before her. Her memories are as muddled as they’ve ever been but she _knows_ him, has seen those kind wrinkles at the edges of his face, can feel the ocean—no, perhaps not the ocean, but water, it’s water, there are currents and waves and tides— the water is flowing through him as surely as the ocean flows through her. Unable to stop herself, she reaches out to him—

And is almost rendered breathless from the grief she senses.

Beneath the tension, somewhere along the squinted worry lines of his eyes, oh, there is kindness unlike she has seen in a century. Kindness of a species drowned and scattered to extinction. She is devastated on his behalf, engulfed by his grief. How did he escape?

“Oh,” Alura gasps, the stories, the _memories_ returning with startling clarity.

It was an age ago, more than—perhaps a century?—when she had swum so far to convene with the River’s High King, the Son of the Sea, the Father of Waters. Tales of the river changeling’s dwindling populations had reached the tribe and Alura had volunteered as representative, ever cognizant of their own fragile numbers. But her meeting was after the attacks that had culled his power, after the civil wars, after the refugees scattered and the diaspora of river changelings integrated with every sea the world over.

In the last fifty years, she has thought nothing of him.

“Father of Waters,” Alura mutters, pushing against Vasquez’s hands and dropping to the floor, convinced this insufficient floundering atop her _knees_ is nothing the High King deserves by way of greeting. She recites what she can remember of the old salutations, stumbling over some words when her voice turns screechy without the water around her. Here, in the midst of these humans, is one of the remaining High Rulers of the Waters. “Son of the Sea and River guardian, the Encantado of J’onzz Sovereign House—”

“What ails you, Alura In-Ze, first born and remainder, ambassador to the Amazon?”

His voice is as hospitable as it had been so many years ago. He stoops, then tilts her chin up from her prone bow and she sees him hold a hand up, no doubt to keep the two human women from falling to her immediate aid. She feels the tears flowing freely now, feels Oracle-touched, blessed, to have been found by a connection to the High King, something familiar in this dry, foreign white world.

“I am alone,” Alura gasps. “I am alone and I cannot… my _memories_ —”

“I know your loneliness.”

“Uh, Director?”

“Agent Lane, will you see that the service tank in B Wing is ready for use?”

“Sir,” Vasquez interrupts. “She can’t go in the water—”

“Use the sealant from R&D and the water-proof material to cover the incision, Dr. Vasquez,” the High King advises. “We need to calm her mind before we can concern ourselves with her body.” King J’onnz lays his hand atop her head and shuts his eyes for a moment. “Do you remember what I told you, very long ago?”

“It has always been difficult for you to know the minds of our kind,” Alura says, relaxing beneath his touch.

“Know this, then: I would take your burden from you if I could,” the High King continues. “Our team here will do everything to ensure your safety. Agent Lane.”

“…sir?”

“I believe I said you were to prep the containment tank in B Wing.”

“Sir, with all due respect, this doesn’t make any sense—”

“Director Henshaw.”

Alura looks toward the door at another young man in black, pressing against his ear.

“Agent Danvers is coming in with another mermaid, sir. Non hostile. Her only request is to meet with Supergirl. Danvers implied there’s some connection there.”

“ETA?”

“Danvers just checked in at HQ.”

“And Supergirl?”

“En route.”

“Redirect Danvers here. If we have a healthy non hostile, it could make things a little more comfortable for our subject in recovery.” The High King doesn’t smile fully. Alura wonders if he can, surrounded as he is by subordinates, people who look to him for guidance. But his expression is like Lucy’s. Soft. Reassuring. Her panic is receding, knowing a being of the waters will watch over her even if he is commander of the humans.

“Sir, I’ll oversee the tank in Wing B, but can we please get the crying woman off the floor?” Lucy asks plainly, her own arms now crossed over her chest. Her incredulity and irreverence suggests either intimate familiarity or outright ignorance of the High King’s status.

“Merwoman, Agent Lane,” the High King returns, aiding Lucy as they pick Alura up once again. Between Lucy and her ever-changing series of helpers, Alura might never have to get used to the terrible _legs_. “And let’s keep what happened here between us,” the High King says to his agent. “Because of some medical issues, Dr. Vasquez knows of my… let’s call it a condition. You may be on the mermaid case, but you’re still not cleared on all the classifed information.”

“Sir, in order to do my job, I really think I should know everything I can in order to—”

“I have no doubt you will, Agent Lane,” the High King answers her. “But it’s only your first day, and you’re nearing triple overtime. Why not call it a night and let Vasquez take over. We’ll review Alura’s information in the morning.”

“Sir, she called you seventeen different names in nearly as many languages,” Lucy argues, her brows pinched together, shoulders thrown back and chin stuck out. The High King dwarfs the woman, but Alura is taken back to hers and Lucy’s exchange from the morning: _small and strong_. Some of the more diminutive fish in the ocean often produce the most crippling of poisons. Alura wonders if Lucy could disarm larger beings in similar fashion.

“Far be it from me to get fired by arguing with a superior on day one, but she’s my charge. My case,” Lucy persists, and Alura can detect no evidence of fatigue in her convicted address. “And if you know a _mermaid,_ don’t you think it’s both mine and Alura’s right that you fill us in on the information you’re withholding so we can piece some answers together for her?”

The knock at the door breaks the staring contest Lucy and the High King have been engaged in for the duration of their argument.

“Sir, you won’t believe who I’ve—oh my god.”

“Agent Danvers.” The High King looks back at another woman not dressed in the standard black. Instead, she sports blue pants and a nondescript top, some large black device strapped round her waist. Short dark hair. Brown eyes.

And utter astonishment on her face.

“Danvers, what is it?” the High King asks, crossing quickly toward the door.

“This isn’t finished yet,” Lucy says, tapping Alura’s shoulder to get her attention back. “Something is off… how… how do you know him?”

“I agree with you, Lucy,” Alura continues, shaking her head. “It doesn’t make sense. You say he is your commander?”

“Our Director, yes.”

“And he is here… in some permanent capacity?”

“I’m pretty sure he lives on-site,” Lucy answers, glancing toward the doorway. “Hey, wait a second. That woman looks just like—”

“You.”

It’s fast. The shouting, the shoving, the swirl of limbs as blows and insults are traded near the entrance of her small room. The woman with the dark hair is casually knocked aside, and then Alura sees the High King fly backwards through the air, thudding against the far wall and then hitting the ground hard.

“False King of the weeping waters! Coward Son of the Seas!”

That voice.

That _anguish_.

Alura knows that desperation, knows it as surely as she knows the ridges and reefs of her homewaters. There’s hope, then horror, then relief and a flood of shame. A flash of physical pain from her side, fire behind her eyes, the vision of some undulating serpent, winding its way closer to human shores on the southern current.

“Astra?”

“What of this commander, usurper, liar and trickster of the river provinces?” her sister shoves past the woman blocking her path from the High King, tromping in with righteous fury. “We came to you, we sent emissaries, you refused to help our forces—”

“Astra!” Alura calls again.

Her sister turns from her tirade against the High King and stares, her jaw hung agape, her fingers curling in and out of fists. Her focus darts toward the man on the ground, then behind her, back to the woman who had accompanied her to the room in the first place. It hurts seeing her sister so angry, seeing her so confused, so lost… robbed of all reason.

“What is this?” Astra murmurs lightly, her tone of ambivalence tinged with sorrow.

“Astra,” she says again, standing on weak legs, feeling her unfamiliar muscles protest under the strain. Lucy moves to her but Alura shrugs her off, taking unstable steps toward her tense sister. She feels much like a human in this instant, unable to withstand the depths, unable to adjust to the pressure. Black spots and blurry edges crawl across her vision.

“Astra, you’re… you’re…”

Astra moves forward as well, the strain on her face even more apparent in this terrible light than it had been when Alura told her of her plans to send Kara ashore all those years ago. The pain in her head and body morphs somewhere along Alura’s journey over the tile into weightlessness, into numbness, and she can no longer feel the two extremities dangling off the trunk of her body. “… you’re alive,” she says, reaching out to wipe the single tear running over Astra’s cheek with her thumb.

“Alura?” Astra asks, though Alura never gets to answer her.

Her vision fades to black, her knees give out from the pain, and the echo of her own name on Astra’s lips roars in her ears with all the relentless fury of the Leviathan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who finally updated???
> 
> I know it's been ages, but I wrote an entire multi-chap side fic for GD that just took all my attention. But now I'm back, and we've got So. Much. Mermaid. Backstory. I took the crown-commanding bit from selkie legend and adapted it to my own purposes, and really hope all the ~pLoT~ didn't turn y'all off. Thanks everybody for all the feedback just on the first chapter alone. Big plans, big story, lotsa relationships. But I'll try my best to deliver if y'all like it!
> 
> Heavy on the In-Ze jaguars, because PLOT, but Kara's coming next chapter and also our lovely CATfish *laughs forever*


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I am having to do this  
> not like Cousteau with his  
> assiduous team  
> aboard the sun-flooded schooner  
> but here alone.

One mermaid sits by the bedside of another, holding onto a pale, cool, immobile hand. Astra periodically runs her finger over the edge of her sister’s face and whispers, Susan keeping her attention focused on the monitors to give the twins a semblance of privacy. Lucy looks at the pair of them through the window from the circular room that comprises the medbay. She wonders what that’s like, to love a sister so much she would rage against any who attempted to hold her back, to throw punches and kick and shout and bite just to huddle against her unconscious form on the bedside.

Needless to say, Astra did not take the news of Alura’s condition very well.

Lucy, Alex, and the Director had all exited the recovery room after an uneasy fifteen minutes in which Astra nearly came undone, ripping a plastic bag of saline solution off a standing IV pole and then twirling the metal rod overhead as she placed herself between the DEO staff and Alura.

Thank God Alex had been there to talk her out of disemboweling everyone.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“How long have you had her?!”

“Astra, calm down—”

“Your ship… you _lied_ to me, you knew, you’ve always known—”

“No, I didn’t lie, I didn’t even know she was here—”

“How long?!” Astra shouted, jabbing the pole at the congregation of humans facing the foot of Alura’s hospital bed. “Answer me!”

“I found her this morning!” Lucy spoke up, stepping nearer to Alex’s side as Henshaw and Vasquez began to flank the woman brandishing the pole. Astra’s head twitched from person to person, taking in every variable, every body, as if gauging the best way to take them all out with a single swipe. “This morning—she was injured,” Lucy tried to explain. “That’s why she passed out… we had to take her to the OR for surgery. There was some major internal hemorrhaging, and we needed to make sure the organs were repaired so she wouldn’t bleed out, or go septic—”

“Speak plainly, human!”

“She was hurt and they healed her,” Alex inched closer, hand extended, keeping her eyes on the inch-thick pole the woman (merwoman) held with all the menacing grace of a professional quarterstaff fighter. “She’s recovering, Astra, you have to let us help her…”

“She was dead,” Astra’s grip on the pole tightened, and Lucy could see the fingerprints denting the metal. “Five years ago, when I got out… I _looked_ for her, Alexandra, our tribe had been decimated, there was no one… no one…”

Alex had finally laid hands on the pole and forced it lower, then started mumbling about glaciers and boats and sisters and Lucy took that distraction to nod at Vasquez. Lucy kept an ear out for Alex and Astra’s conversation while she maneuvered around the distraught twin and escorted the doctor to Alura’s bedside.

“Wait, no, what are they doing—”

“It’s alright, it’s fine,” Alex said. “They’re checking her vitals.”

“Vitals?”

“She’s not at her full health, is that right?” Alex asked, turning over her shoulder to stare at Lucy.

Lucy shook her head. “She was bleeding out in the water when I found her south of Sand Dollar. But… she had her legs. Already in human form.”

“Not if she was in the water,” Astra objected.

“No, she… that’s why I intervened in the first place. I didn’t know she was—she had legs. I thought she was human. It wasn’t until after I got her on the beach that I realized something was off,” Lucy thought back to the morning, hours that felt like weeks ago.

Bringing Alura in, watching as they rolled her into surgery. And then, the escort to the locker rooms, the tour, the hand-off of her New Recruit Orientation Manual as long as the U.S. Naval Code (that she hasn’t even peeked at yet). Paperwork, paperwork, a fairly intense ‘welcome’ video that went into grizzly details concerning hypothermia, and then the physical training assessment in the afternoon: the trainer had her treading water for an hour, doing rescue dives with various weights and sunken practice dummies. Add to that the standard push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, and the two-mile run (which had been postponed to the following day because she’d opted for the water workout first) and Lucy would finally be cleared for physical field work. Not that she hadn’t essentially started this gig in the field, finding a creature, reporting the incident, calling in a team, going through the transport, the processing, more paperwork—she’s been going non-stop since she stepped foot on Sand Dollar beach, her adrenaline levels finally depleted.

“Her speech,” Lucy continued to address Astra, in reference to Alura. “Her… she kept talking about her missing diadem, and was terrified of the authorities finding her. She can’t remember much.”

Astra looked once more over to the dented IV pole that had been cast off to the corner, the onset of a vengeful tempest clouding her features. Lucy wondered at the strange differences between two people who looked like identical twins; despite having only ever seen Alura in pain, in distress, Lucy couldn’t picture Alura ever looking like Astra: defiant, fierce, unyielding.

“Who did this to her?” Astra growled.

“Too early for that,” Lucy crossed to the foot of the bed where Astra stood sentry. The merwoman’s ocean green eyes skirted over every limb, traced the fragile lines of her sister’s healing form as if checking for herself that Alura was no longer injured.

Lucy didn’t need her years of expertise grilling witnesses to figure out that Astra’s sneer translated to distrust and derision, especially after the episode with Director Henshaw.

“Hey,” Lucy had tried to divert her attention once again. “We don’t know, but it’s our job to find out. I’m supervising Alura’s case, so we’ll keep you updated.”

“You?” Astra looked her up and down the same way some of the SEALs had during boot camp seconds before she’d squirmed out of their holds and shoved their faces into the mats. “You are very small.”

“And you are remarkably like your sister,” Lucy huffed. “She said the same thing, but I still got her here.”

“I owe you my gratitude, then,” Astra said, inclining her head briefly, then turning back to the woman on the bed. Lucy would receive no praise-worthy speeches from this wom—merwoman.

“Lucy,” Alex intercepted her once Astra had turned her full attention back to Alura. The stern merwoman stood over her sister’s bedside like family preparing to hear last rites.

Rigid. Shocked. Sorrowful.

Again, her sister’s twin, but far more foreign-seeming than Alura. Perhaps wounded, the merfolk didn’t look so different, for both species—human and merfolk—were vulnerable. But Astra’s proud stance and irreverent regard for procedure was truly alienating, widening the divide between species and rocketing Lucy’s caution levels to their highest position. Astra didn’t trust them? Fine. Lucy never much trusted merkind, either.

“You found her this morning?” Alex asked.

“Right after I talked to you and James,” Lucy mumbled, soft enough not to startle Astra into another violent outburst. “She was in surgery for almost five hours. She only just woke up about half an hour ago. Susan said that’s… well, they’ve never had to do surgery on a mermaid before, so she’s going with ‘normal’.”

“Astra was on the rocks this morning, watching us.” Alex said. “You don’t think… Astra thought Alura was dead, but then they both show up on the same day? On the same beach? That can’t be a coincidence.”

“Alura said she tried to get Astra out of some ice. Do you know what that means?”

Alex wiped a hand over her face, shaking her head in disbelief. “Get this, the merfolk keep their prisoners and some of the creatures that they capture in _glaciers_. Apparently, the merfolk have something like freeze breath.”

“I’ve never seen Supergirl use it,” Lucy said, less inclined to talk about the more popular mermaid.

“Well, they use it—the glaciers—for their version of lock-up. They freeze the creatures with their breath into the ice flows, like cryogenesis or, uhm, suspended animation. Astra got out five years ago, and she’s been looking for K—I mean,” Alex had cut herself off there, turning her attention to the back of Astra’s head. “I mean, she’s been alone ever since. Said their people were… just gone.”

Lucy hadn’t pressed when she heard the verbal stumble, filing Alex’s slip away for another day. There were other mysteries she wanted resolved before they investigated Astra’s movements over the last few years.

“Five years exactly?” Lucy asked for confirmation. “The last thing Alura remembered was trying to bust Astra out of mermaid ice prison. You mean to say she’s lost _five years_ of her memory?”

“Seems so. Did Alura say anything else?” Alex propped her hands on her hips in a characteristic pose borne from multiple tactical meetings standing around the command table at HQ. Lucy recognized a power pose, because she had one, too. Hers was the crossed arms, the tilted chin, anything to make her seem a little bigger, a little more like someone others should pay attention to. Lucy had never noticed before, but Alex’s power pose looked a lot like Supergirl’s.

“I mean did she talk about anyone, uhm, thing—or, any other merfolk?” Alex clarified. “Because if Astra thinks they’re all gone—”

“She didn’t get the chance,” Lucy had said. “She had a breakdown, understandably. Almost started hyperventilating. It’s hard for her to breathe in this form, has been since I first ran into her. I think I touched her gills this morning on accident, but they just—disappeared?”

“Have you been by my lab?”

“First day,” Lucy shrugged. “I haven’t had the chance.”

“Susan’s medical, I’m research. We’ve looked at the merfolk gills before during the change. The flaps of skin sew themselves together and the gills flatten out. It’s part of their biologies, stuff we can’t explain yet.”

“Like the legs thing? They can just… sprout them at will?”

“Something about advanced environmental adjustments,” Alex explained. “Their equilibrium maintenance is like—it’s almost like mutations that should take centuries to occur to a human body can happen in seconds for them. And they can control it, adjust it. It’s why they can dive so deep without being crushed and then surface so quickly. They breathe normally in our atmosphere without having to worry about the bends. Their systems are remarkable, it’s why they can see underwater with their enhanced optics. Why Supergirl can do—well, everything she does.”

“But still prone to memory loss, even with all that?” Lucy asked.

“Seems to be the case,” Alex had deduced, watching as Astra finally took a seat on the bed’s edge at Susan’s insistence.

“And Director Henshaw?” Lucy mumbled.

“What?” Alex asked.

“The both of them had some fairly strong reactions when he walked in the room. Astra nearly put him through a wall and Alura was bowing to him.”

“Wait, bowing?”

“On her knees,” Lucy explained. “Fawning over him, like she knew him. Makes me wonder… how long have you worked here again, Alex?”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Go on some fishing expedition with me,” Alex checked her, leveling a hostile stare in her Lucy’s direction. “I know when I’m being interrogated.”

“Don’t you think it’s our right to know who we work for?” Lucy whispered, eyeing the man who hadn’t moved from his standing position in the corner. “My first day on the job and I’ve already witnessed major surgery on a creature most of the world doesn’t even know exists, and then was nearly impaled by another one with a javelin IV.”

“That’s SOP here, Lane.”

“Alex,” Lucy had muttered, grabbing the more seasoned agent and tugging her toward the corner. “What the hell is going on with those three?”

Alex sighed, cast one baleful look at the Director, and then nodded off toward the corridor. “Let’s go debrief with Director Henshaw,” she’d suggested. “Give Astra a minute for Vasquez to explain.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Which leaves them on the outside looking in through glass panes as Susan speaks quietly with Astra, pointing at various monitors as the confused merwoman sits beside her sister, holding her hand, teetering on the verge of a breakdown (not that Astra shows it). It’s the set of her shoulders, the way her chest expands and shrinks, as if she can’t catch her breath. There, Lucy thinks: _the breathing_. That’s where Astra and Alura are similar.

“Stone face, that one,” Henshaw says in reference to Astra. “Wasn’t great being on the receiving end of that temper, though.” He rubs the back of his neck, as if working out a kink.

“Makes you wonder why she flew off the handle,” Lucy grumbles, skeptical of his sincerity. “Look at her. She’s protective, not irrational.”

“You’ve hardly spoken with her,” Alex objects. “At least, not across from the business end of an IV pole.”

“I don’t have to speak long with victims to notice their reactions when their abuser walks into the courtroom,” Lucy objects, having prepared this defense the moment she noticed Alura’s strange actions with Hank. “And I don’t have to speak long with robbery or assault witnesses when they tense up, when they get cagey picking people out of line-ups even though they know, logically, those people can’t see through glass. And those two?” Lucy dips her chin toward the twins, no more human than the man standing behind her. “They look like they’ve seen a ghost. Care to explain, Director Henshaw?”

Alex and Hank trade loaded stares, then turn their attention toward their boots.

Lucy crosses her arms, because she’s pissed.

She is not hot-headed, or a firecracker, or temperamental, or rash. She took on this case, this _job_ , without all of the information and now she’s mad as hell. When new information gets turned over in the middle of a case, it throws a curve into carefully crafted arguments. It screws with the narrative she’s trying to present, forcing her to consider other variables. This wasn’t information that hadn’t been presented because it wasn’t known. This information was _withheld_. So yeah, working for a man two memory-addled mermaids seem to view as some authority figure puts her ill-at-ease, especially with what she knows of the DEO’s reputation via the scuttlebutt from the upper echelons of the Navy. So Lucy’s not just mad.

She is justifiably _pissed off._

“Or Father of Slip ‘n Slides, but I guess the officers at the California Naval bases don’t know about that title, do they?”

“Wait a minute—”

“Alex, stand down,” Henshaw says, sticking his hand between the two agents. He checks over his shoulder down both corridors then rubs at his eyes with his thumb and index, shaking his head silently. “You’re right of course, Agent Lane. I know those creatures.”

“How?”

“Director,” Alex insists, voice low and guarded. “Supergirl is one thing, but this is a Lane—”

“I’m not just ‘a Lane’. I’m an Agent of the DEO, and an officer of naval law,” Lucy fires back. “For once can we leave my father out of this so I can do my damn job?”

“Lucy, it’s not that simple, we just…” Alex trails off, looks toward the hospital room, to Henshaw, then over her own shoulder, the paranoia radiating off of the two like a wave of desert head. Lucy feels hot under the collar, ready to punch something from frustration, ready to walk right out the front doors… then again, whatever information the pair are keeping close to the vest feels pretty big, feels inevitable. It’s as if she’s perched cliff side, ready to jump into an unknown depth without thinking about the repercussions. Good. Maybe it’s time for her to stop overthinking things.

“There’s people here we have to protect,” Alex finally continues. “Family. Secrets are the only things that give them a chance at a normal life.” Alex moves closer. “The DEO is _not_ in on this, so it’s no slight to your capabilities. We’re just… wary.”

Lucy is seconds away from exploding, like a forgotten mine brushed by a submarine. But fine. She gets it. Consigned to the perimeter once more, never trusted by virtue of her merit, but her _name_. Plus, Lucy Lane hates a secret. It’s why she got along with Cat Grant so well initially. Why she pushed and pushed James until he finally admitted he didn’t love her anymore. Why she demanded the truths from Lois surrounding the details of her mother’s death. But sure. It’s fine. Out-of-the-loop Lucy, working in a secret government facility, brimming with secrets of its own.

Why is she so surprised? What right does she have to be offended?

_Maybe because I thought these people were the good guys._

Lucy clenches her fingers into the muscles of her arms and goes for the bluff: “Okay, whatever. This is obviously not a good fit for me. I can handle secret sea monsters and dying mermaids and glacier prisons, but I can’t handle working for people who don’t trust me. Henshaw, Danvers, I’ll stay for the duration of Alura’s case, not because of this place, but because she needs someone who’s going to look out for her best interests. And I don’t think that’s some Son of the Sand Castles and his tight-lipped number two.”

Henshaw gives his best ‘disgruntled’ stare in the stand-off, but Lucy’s held her own through a number of grizzly misconduct interrogations. Been shouted at. Kicked from underneath a table. Even attacked, in one instance where the defendant issued a death threat. Lucy’s got a good game face, so one withering look from a superior won’t have her shriveling up like some washed-up jellyfish.

“Agent Lane, will you come with us, please?”

“Hank,” Alex grabs her superior officer by the arm. “Seriously? Supergirl will be here any minute.”

“It won’t take long… plus, she knows already, Alex, and better giving Agent Lane the truth than having her spread half-cocked lies. It’s not fair to her. If she’ll go to bat for a creature she met twenty hours ago, she’ll do the same once she trusts us,” Henshaw ducks his head, some heavy weight cast off from his shoulders. Or perhaps weighted differently, as if this strange secret the pair keeps might lighten if another set of shoulders helps with the load. “Her trust with us starts with us exercising a little faith in her.”

Henshaw turns on his heel and Lucy falls into step behind him, catching a series of grumbles out of Alex that sound suspiciously like ‘centuries-old wisdom my ass’ and ‘water-logged dolphin-brain’. They pass several units on night shift, some in the standard black DEO gear, others in grey and black wet suits. They don’t stop at command, or even at the main pool, instead turning for the elevators that take them down to the caves beneath. The multi-million dollar facility had been built into the cliff side and sported multiple sub floors, hollowed out caverns filled with ocean water for some of the DEO’s larger acquisitions, and a harbor with all of their research and aquatic strike vessels. There had been something of a tour given by one of the new recruits earlier that morning, but Lucy hadn’t paid as much attention as she should have. She was rather more concerned at the time with the dying woman— _mermaid_ she’d found on the beach.

“Is all of this necessary?” Lucy asks.

“We told you, it’s a secret,” Alex gripes.

“Then how come you know?” Lucy asks.

“Supergirl,” Alex answers.

_Of course. Is there one thing that mermaid doesn’t know?_

“You know, I met her before. When I was handling that case with the mutated whale pod and the Navy?”

“Oh?”

“She didn’t seem all that impressive to me,” Lucy mutters, keeping her eyes trained on Hank’s back.

Alex chuckles, smirking down at her. “Is that so? Was it the swimming-faster-than-a-speed-boat or the super strength that didn’t impress you?”

If she’s being honest with herself, Lucy wagers it was the _James Olsen is getting another Pulitzer and is obsessed with her_ that Lucy originally found the least impressive, but once she got over that… Well, there’s still something off about Supergirl. Not so much with her feats than with her personality. She always seems guarded, like she’s hiding something. An identity, most likely, but then again…

Lucy Lane has always hated a secret.

“Why does she get access to confidential information?” Lucy asks.

“She really shouldn’t,” Hank says plainly. “She’s terrible at keeping things to herself.”

“Don’t tell her that,” Alex smirks.

“How are you two so familiar with her? She’s not even a full DEO operative.”

“She has her own connections here, but that’s her information to tell, not ours,” Alex explains. “J’onn, on the other hand—”

“Wait,” Lucy stops short before the elevators at the end of the hall. “J’onn?”

“My name is J’onn J’onnz,” Director Henshaw states, drawing up to his full height in front of the elevator doors. “I assumed the form of Hank Henshaw after an incident several years ago on the Amazon River. I have been leading the DEO under his name ever since.”

They pile into the elevator and Lucy takes a place in the back, propping herself against the handrail (wondering if this was safe, following the two DEO agents who seem to be looking out for their own best interests).

“Assumed the form…” Lucy sidesteps to the corner of the tiny space. “You’re a… are you a merperson, too?”

“Not quite,” Henshaw— _J’onn_ tells her, turning as the speedy car comes to a stop on the lowest floor of the facility. The doors open and suddenly _J’onn_ disappears from her sight.

The cavern is large, meters of rock dug out by very expensive equipment that cost the government more than the taxpayers would like to know. The pool before them is calm, the size average, perhaps only as large as an Olympic swimming pool’s perimeter. The walls, however, are dark mountain rock, and the low-watt institutional lighting doesn’t add any element of comforting mood to the place. This is likely where they hold sharks and serpents, massive sea lion hybrids or that one humanoid whose entire body was composed of rock, anemone, and coral. The thing was its own reef, and sought to overtake a large portion of the coastline before Supergirl swam in and saved the day.

The splash in the pool before them indicates Hank’s new location. But… the pool is fifty feet away. And Lucy didn’t see him run toward it.

“He hasn’t done this for anyone before,” Alex tells her. “You’re the first.”

“What about you?”

“I caught him in the shift. There’s… family history with me, why he revealed himself. He’s never done it for an agent, especially one on her first day.”

“I don’t understand why everything around here has to be kept so hush—”

Suddenly, a massive creature leaps out of the water and screeches, hanging in the arch for longer than physics should deem possible. At the peak of its ascent, the form shifts, transforming from a dolphin-like creature with green skin and a pink underbelly back to humanoid form, tail still attached but with a rectangular dorsal fin, bulbous forehead, and a mouth full of sharpened, serrated teeth.

“—hush,” Lucy finishes, though it’s with decidedly less righteous annoyance than what she began her sentence with.

“I’ve seen a lot of sea creatures in my years with the DEO,” Alex mutters, leaning down to whisper toward Lucy. “But he’s really strange.”

“I heard that, Agent Danvers,” Hank—no, J’onn says—swimming toward the ledge of the man-made pool. His head is far larger than a human’s, square shaped, with green, dewey skin covering his back, his arms, and most of his torso, excepting for the smattering of pink on his chest. The fin on his back seems sturdier than the flexible dorsal fin Lucy’s seen on Supergirl at a distance, as if there is harder cartilage sprouting out of his spine.

“You’re a… dolphin,” Lucy declares, eyes wide and awed. Her delirious smile falters slightly, when the rumbling of the pool grows louder, spurts of water bubbling all round his form, geyser-like, columns of bubbles responding to his touch.

The kinetic force of the water lifts his body from the pool and Lucy can see his tail, much longer than Supergirl’s, floating ten feet above her on a rushing cloud of sea water.

“I am J’onn J’onnz, High King of the Rivers, Encantado of the Eastern Currents and Son of the Seas. The rivers were once mine, until great tragedy befell my people. As the Ninth Father of Waters, many seek my guidance and many have fallen by my hand.”

The air beside him flashes, as if a shimmer of reality has been pierced, a watery curtain through which the fishman pulls his pointed weapon: a spear, taller than Lucy with a pointed tip more deadly than a bowie knife.

“I’ve done a lot of diving in my life,” Alex whispers, crossing her arms and surveying J’onn’s introduction. “But the first time I saw that I never thought I’d stick a toe in the water again.”

“I sympathize,” Lucy squeaks, watching as the water billows around the waist of a being almost as ancient as the ocean itself.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Astra watches the tiny green mountains form on the black glass. The woman, the doctor, _Dr. Vasquez_ , had called the device a _monitor_. A monitor with noisy spikes, which registered Alura’s heartbeat.

_Heartbeat_.

Astra has lived for centuries and never faced dead creatures with beating hearts.

Dead. Perished. Demised.

Her sister was dead.

Alura…

Alura was _dead_.

Yet she is not dead, suspended instead, in some unconscious state with the deformed legs, breathing with _lungs_ that suck and expel oxygen like the weak beings of the shore. Astra shifts to prop her elbows atop her kneecaps as she stares at her sister, a long-lost face that she’s seen so regularly as of late, what with keeping to the surface waters and all the possibilities for reflection.

Astra’s smile is small. She cannot help it forming, watching Alura rest before her.

She remembers a time when the pair of them had not known how similar they truly were, what it actually meant to be _twins._ Alura would know for certain from her years of study, but Astra cannot recall ever meeting a pair of merfolk twins. Yes of course, the tribes had called them so and others had told them of the replication, but when tasked with looking at themselves in their earliest years, reflective materials were difficult to come by unless one swam to the surface… and the younger merfolk were kept below when the laws were stricter.

But one day, perhaps in her third decade, she had come across the looking glass in the captain’s cabin of the sunken ship. Her people had resided in the utopian gulf in those days, until men sailing across the Atlantic came along in short order and claimed the islands for their own exploitation.

But with man came ships, and with ships great treasure in the form of jewels and new advancements. Her people had always been ingenious, their abilities to repurpose the cast-offs of other species something Astra took great pride in. She could hardly bear the waste of the previous age (let alone this one), and was thankful she had been taught so much about recycling in her earliest years as scout.

She had been sent for supplies to the sunken vessel teetering precariously on the coastal shelf, but upon seeing herself in the _mirror_ , had started back and nearly rammed her body into the water-rotted beams.

That was Alura looking back at her, even though her sister had been floating beneath the orators in careful study for the better part of a week. Astra had been set with the exploratory task, so there was no way Alura could have snuck along behind her. Still, Alura’s face stared determinedly back from the glass, the lines of her mouth drawn tighter than the typical serenity her easy nature afforded. And yet, Alura did not wear her hair braided, pulled back and tucked over her ears, that white stripe hidden beneath the twisted curls to distract others from the anomaly. Alura was not the one sent to the borders of her homewaters for scouting purposes, had not beaten every other swimmer in her class during the current hurdles, and was not staring into the glass, running uncertain fingers over her chin.

They weren’t just twins. They were exact reproductions. Countenances differed only in expression but not structure, not composition; her bearing seemed only slightly altered from her sister’s somewhere around the neck, the chin. Alura was diplomatic and deferential, Astra daring and dominant. When she raised her hand within view of the glass, the reflection did the same, and it was then that she knew she and Alura were different, uncommon, alike to each other but to no other merperson living in the seas.

She had taken the mirror and kept it, her first defiance of many against the council—for they lived in a collective society. The individual prospered only if the tribe did, and to withhold any items from official scouting missions counted in those days as community offense.

But she and Alura were _different_.

And yes, her righteous sister would undoubtedly scold her for keeping the piece, but it also felt like a gift to Alura, to her sister who so desired to know all, to acquire power through knowledge, not Astra’s preferred route of combined strategy and force. The mirror had astonished them both, for with the mirror’s reflective revelations came the understanding that theirs was a connection both inexplicable and profound.

Astra needs no mirror now, looking down at her sister. Alura’s pallor is translucent as her people’s skin after many weeks spent navigating the depths. Astra is thankful Dr. Vasquez had turned off all the overhead lights save the single one near the monitors, shining upwards toward all the equipment. She sits with Alura in the dark, willing motion into a powerless hand, as if her grasp holds some residual power from the water, from her people, the Oracle, her battle frenzy—as if she can restore life and health to her sister through touch alone. She extends her trembling left hand and places it carefully atop her sister’s, then recites the prayers for the lost.

Alura was _dead_.

Dead like Con-Tul on the deck of that ship, run through after her own blade had… after she had struck with… after they had strung him up with…

Astra blinks back the hot sting and thinks it fitting tears have a similar composition to the ocean. For though her environment keeps her living it is also a bitter, harsh world, a world with such a powerful taste of vengeance that she recognizes the flavor every time it pours down her cheeks, every time she thinks of all she’s lost, all she might lose, all she can never have.

And yet she has her sister again. Kara will return. The False High King of the Amazon still lives. All of these connections she once thought long lost as the crews of numerous doomed vessels have miraculously come round to her once more. Her five years of solitude seem like just payment for such fortune, though she has nothing of any significant value that might restore a species that once was, a people, a culture, a language and a life that no longer exists.

“I will see justice done for you,” she promises Alura, bringing her limp, delicate hand up to her lips. “Those who have harmed you, who have wronged you, who have taken you from me, sister—”

She knows Alura cannot hear her, may not even remember her _walking_ across this peculiar human _floor_ to catch her before she fell to blackness. Does Alura know of the High King? Of Kara? Or of Alexandra and her namesake vessel, of the doctor, the shorter _agent_ of this facility, this _lab_ where Alex works with the _DEO_?

Such foreign, bizarre entities that believe they can impose order on something as untenable, something as unruly and primeval as the ocean.

Does Alura feel the pull as well? Is that how she returned to these shores after years of absence? For Kara? Supergirl? Or was it that call, that song, those visions Astra has been plagued with since her escape from the ice prison—visions of stygian darkness and two bright, golden eyes piercing the gloom like beams from the human’s largest ships; the visions of sea monsters Astra has fought in her past, other that she has never encountered, all veering toward them, toward _Supergirl_ , with such determined haste it cannot be coincidence; visions of that are less sight than song, a feeling of unity, of understanding, a feeling of reconciliation that they have both sought since acknowledging their distinction as _twins_ ; the vision of the sea below, as if they are looking down upon the waves from a great height and can see the vastness of the seven seas splayed out before them.

What is happening to the pair of them?

What noteworthy mark did they bear to be both blessed and cursed as the last of their race?

And what of Kara? Whom—to Astra’s knowledge—was the sole survivor of their tribe, the mermaid to bridge both land and sea? Astra feels the pull to her niece, though not nearly as forceful as the pull to her sister. She and Alura have had centuries together, have overcome trials and wars, minor squabbles and immense personal battles the likes of which many believed were irreconcilable. Those outsiders thought she and Alura would be hard-pressed to find forgiveness for one another, but through it all they remained sisters, family, a part of each other just as the seas are a part of their souls. The same water bore them, molded them, perhaps even split and replicated them from the primordial materials from which all merfolk are formed. It is why this resurrection comes as such a shock. It is why Astra feels Alura’s loss so critically.

_The diadem_.

Astra kisses her sister’s hand again and places it back down. Like soothing tidal pools near the California shores, the gesture is gentle. She reaches for her own crown and removes it, feels the coolness of metal colored grey as shark skin, sleek as shell, so strikingly different from Alura’s crown.

Where Astra’s was slim and streamlined, Alura’s crown was grand, ornamental and regal—what humans might expect of a merfolk aristocracy if their people had ever instituted such a hierarchy in their culture. Pearls and aquamarines, stones of amethyst and jade and worn, twisted nautilus shells, had all been arranged overtop molten gold cooled near the forges.

All that time ago at Alura’s naming ceremony, crowns materialized as resplendent or plain, fanciful or common. The naming and crown distribution was the first indication of one’s role in aquatic society, the Oracle’s hint to individual purpose. Astra could never have worn a crown bedecked with jewels and finery; her battle prowess would have been compromised, all for the sake of keeping her crown out of harm’s way. Just like the bodies of the mermaids, the diadems were strong, powerful, but not unbreakable. Yet Alura needed a crown to draw the eye, for she was often the chosen spokesmerwoman. Orator, counselor, diplomat and happenstance historian, Alura had learned the origin of every piece on her enchanted crown, had a story for every pearl, an adventure for every ridge of every shell. Kara would marvel at her mother’s crown as an infant, running tiny, stubby fingers over the ribbed costates and cerith shells, the broad band of gold shimmering in the sunshine’s rays and gleaming through the clear water of the reef. Kara would paddle along at Alura’s side and Astra would smile—feeling jealousy and gratefulness and depression and elation all in one fleeting instant.

When Kara’s crown was presented at her own ceremony, Alura had bowed deeply to the Oracle’s Official in synchronized reverence with Zor-El. But before the processional could begin, Alura had turned over her shoulder and locked eyes with Astra, skimming her fingers over Kara’s simple golden crown, the crest of El forged on either side and fitted right above her delicate, infantile ears.

_You will teach her well, won’t you?_

Astra did not hear Alura say it, but she knew Alura was counting on Astra to help with Kara. A plain crown did not always mean a fighter, or a warrior, or a scout or an adventurer—there was room for interpretation that still aligned with the Oracle’s prophecy. But Kara’s diadem was similar enough to Astra’s crown to give Alura pause, to picture her daughter swimming back from battle as her sister had been doing for many years. Alura had witnessed how battle etched the lines deep as trenches over Astra’s face, had seen the dimness of the glow in Astra’s eyes grow darker after particularly horrible fights. Astra knew of her sister’s concern, yet had no means to assuage it.

Astra had smiled toward Alura while she wrangled Kara into place at her hip during the processional, the new birthing numbers lessening every year. It would be a short cavalcade about the reef this season and Astra wondered—as she had in certain moments of anxious uncertainty—if a child was something she truly wanted, or something she felt compelled to produce. There were days when she thought it would be best for Kara to have a cousin, a friend by default of familial ties, someone Alura could dote on and Astra could nurture. And others, particularly those in which she did return from tense battle, she was grateful no child had to see the pain that overtook her on occasion. For now, watching Alura carry Kara about the reef under the Oracle’s sight, Astra could wait. Wait until she was certain.

_Of course_.

Alura did not hear Astra answer her, but it was understood between them, as so many other sentiments had been since their intertwined beginnings. And now, after Astra had reconciled herself to a life lived without her other half, she finds her strength sapped even more than the day she found the remains of their tribe, even more than the hour she took to sing the dirge of the dead for her sister—a final hymn decidedly less final than she had supposed.

Astra places her own crown on Alura’s head as she sleeps, but it doesn’t suit her. It will not give her the shifting power back, will not allow her to remember who it was that harmed her. It will only serve as some minor comfort for Astra, who cannot even see her sister as she once was, whole, vibrant, that glimmering tail of cobalt and cornflower blue flickering among the reefs and leaving a trail of bubbles in her wake. They had been so happy once, before the civil disputes among the tribes, before the plummeting populations, before the Leviathan attacks. According to human lore she is ancient, her centuries equated to lived experiences, histories, regional shuffles and technological advancements. Left in the ice for roughly seven years and then swimming on her own for five is scarcely more than a decade, but it has felt more like a lifetime, an eon, an age; for Astra has never had to face the seas without her sister.

“Do not tease me, Alura,” Astra repeats the refrain from bygone days. There were so many stories to know, so many histories, so many legends—all of them Alura’s territory. She was so learned that Astra could never determine if her sister’s tales were fact or fiction. And now, a momentary exchange, a collapse, an unstable _human_ body, and all that’s left is the echo of her sister’s voice.

“You’ve come back to me only to depart? And you talk of fairness,” Astra fakes a touch of disdain, wondering if some of her characteristic attitude will pull Alura from her deep sleep. “Don’t you know your daughter is coming? Don’t you know Kara lives to see you again, and what welcome will you give her, hmm? The laziness of you Orators,” Astra jokes, then chokes, unable to finish the jibe for her tears. “Do not ask me to fill in the missing memories alone, sister,” Astra begs. “For my memories are so connected to you, if you were to truly go—”

It hits her suddenly, like one of those beaming water funnels of heat the Leviathan can expel from its gaping maw:

Astra never mourned her sister.

Without a body, without the knowledge of demise, perhaps Astra always harbored a bit of unlikely hope in the deepest recesses of her soul. She grieved for her culture, for her loss and her homewaters in the sense that she said the rites, thought of the prayers, attempted to put a face to the names of the lost ones who were no longer living once she returned.

But had she truly ever mourned four-hundred years of existence with her soul mate? A merwoman who knew her as surely as she knew her own heart?

“Come back to us,” Astra tells Alura, slipping the crown back atop her own head and bowing over Alura’s bedside, shutting her eyes to block out the horrible green spikes of the monitor poking holes in her sanity.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Today has been a good day. Aside from a terribly late work night (the negotiations with Pacifica still haven’t been settled, but Cat refused to call her lawyer at this hour and felt a little guilty keeping Kara past ten when she still had to drive back to the city), Kara thinks the day has been, on the whole, good.

She’s two hours into a three-ish hour trek back to National City on Highway 1, cruising along the western coast with the window rolled down, aerodynamics and gas mileage be damned. Her job is secure. Her boss most definitely does _not_ want to fire her. Her sister is going to be stoked that Kara’s now got an excuse to visit on weekends. _And_ it’s potsticker Thursday, if she makes the midnight deadline.

Score!

In addition to her work with Cat, she’d wrestled two adolescent skim boarders out from a rip tide, then raced a pod of porpoises down the beach to where she’d left the rental car. Alex had promised her crab claws on her next weekend up to the bay, and Cat had not given Kara the dreaded pink slip.

Kara still has an income! Meager though it may be…

Things at the office—yacht—are finally returning to Cat’s bristly version of equilibrium.

And Kara’s massive, unrequited, never-going-to-happen-in-a-million-centuries crush is becoming more and more a non-issue.

All good things.

Any lingering thoughts that have plagued her over how perfect her boss’s (her boss, her _boss_ , her multi-millionaire-endorsing-products-and-politicians and smelling of heady perfume personally crafted by a chemist in Calais _boss’s_ ) lips might have felt against hers will be pushed to the wayside and completely forgotten, because Kara’s got a good job, a good situation, and far too much riding on her position as a media mogul’s assistant to let a May-December flirtation cart it all to hell.

Cat does not hate her. She will not be fired. Cat implied she found Kara _attractive_ , which is validating in a completely novel way when reviewing typical interactions with one Cat Grant. Kara can chock up her longevity as Cat’s assistant to observation and super-human powers, but honestly, Kara simply _notices_ Cat. And one specific thing she’s noticed in recent weeks is that people haven’t been getting under Cat’s (very soft) skin. Or well, they usually do, but it isn’t often nowadays that Cat shows any outward symptoms of agitation beyond snark levels set to incinerate. Things had been going swimmingly with Dubai, with CatCo’s anniversary—but then the kiss happened, and with it, the relocation.

Kara had gotten under her skin. Or maybe it was the champagne. Or the international offices. It doesn’t matter what instigated the act, but Cat kissed Kara and Kara did not freak out. Kara didn’t do what she really wanted to do, which was to curl her fingers around Cat’s waist in that dress, that blue, skin-tight gown tailored to Anna Wintour approved perfection. She didn’t press Cat up against the balcony railing and sigh against her mouth because in the moment, in the instant Cat’s passion overrode her logic Kara was too _surprised_ to do any of the things she’d fantasized about. She didn’t press into her and didn’t slip her tongue between Cat’s lips and especially didn’t trail her fingers up from Cat’s waist to the moderate slope of her chest and… and… and, in the end, Kara didn’t do any of those things which means, thankfully, Kara will not be fired.

Today has been a good day! And really, aside from the mountain of repressed feelings for her boss…things could not be better! Kara wonders if she thinks hard and brightly enough that she’ll convince herself it’s all true.

Her phones beeps and Kara glances at it, still nervous to text and drive.

_One new message: Miss Grant._

Kara finds a public parking lot near the dunes, seagrass dipping inland, the summer wind off the water far more forceful than in weeks past. Kara parks in the dark, steps out of the vehicle, and grabs her phone, thankful for a reason to stretch her legs. The stars overhead are endless and the salt is heavy on the humid air. Kara inhales—as if she’s been breathing her entire life.

She misses the sea, and clear nights like this remind her of the last time she saw her mother. The Danvers had helped her acclimate to human life through distraction, through lessons, through eventual hobbies, and, once she graduated university, through other responsibilities. But ever since Supergirl’s debut, Kara’s been prone to wander the reefs, content to remain there with no one at her side. She’s finally returned to the sea, to her world, but her people… she does not dwell on loneliness.

Distraction.

Responsibilities.

Cat.

She swipes across the device to check the latest directive.

_Mtg w/Pacifica moved to their yacht. Boat too big for club, docked at Limetown Bay—have Megan fax contracts to Limetown Dock main offices since these troglodytes have no Wifi networks._

_On a yacht._

_Imbeciles._

_*Red face emoji*_

Kara chuckles over the language, shooting off an email to Megan in legal. This Thursday night drive back and forth to the city is terrible, but thankfully, she’ll not have to do it again. Now that Miss Grant has let her in on some of the plans for the rest of the summer, she’ll be able to cut the trip to nothing by swimming instead of driving north. Even against the current, she’ll save so much time and will get to hang out with Alex a bit more than she has, especially since her debut as Supergirl. She’s still on the fence with the mission and philosophy of the DEO, knowing that capture and containment might seem like the best recourse for keeping humanity safe, but also knowing, far better than most, that cooping up creatures so used to an expansive sea can agitate and inflame tempers already hot as forge flames.

Kara confirms with Cat via text and sniffs at the salt on the air, mesmerized by the sky, the sound of the waves, memories materializing in the dark night. There, on the shore, she sees her mother floating by, trailing after a school of fish winding their way over the sandy shelves. Further out Astra leaps high into the air, more shadow than corporeal body, the flash of trident glimmering in the moon’s glow. Fel-Bry, who tattled on her every time she lingered below the surface without permission, and Viridian, named aptly for her tail’s color, with skin the color of cave’s stone, the mergirl who’d been Kara’s closest companion as a child. Zor-El, her father, respected by the Council and diplomat to the Southern tribes, with his boyish grin and the strong jaw Alura always cupped in hand after his return from the annual Negotiations.

But memories are not tangible and a people cannot be resurrected. Kara cannot touch their scales, cannot listen to their songs or look upon their faces any longer. The ocean endures, unlike the populations it once supported.

In the human’s geography lessons, she learned that the volume of the ocean is much greater than the area of the land. By the time Kara was twelve, she had already traveled to three separate oceans. She had explained her people’s nomadic tendencies, which came as somewhat of a foreign concept to Alex. She had tried to explain the idea of homewaters, a seasonal return, but could not seem to articulate the pattern with any degree of sense.

An area cannot sustain a population of a mertribe for too long, but rotating habitation of the rocky shelf along the California coast was simply part of her life. There was so much Alex knew about Kara now that had seemed so strange to her foster-sister when she’d first been brought inland—there is so much about _human_ culture (wi-fi and self-tanner and hashtags and differential calculus and cheese wontons and manual steering) that Kara could never think to relay to her people. To the few friends in her tribe. To her family, the elders, her mother. To her father.

The memories feel closer tonight, sit more heavily within her chest. Her family is always at the forefront of her mind when she dives back into the ocean, but something seems to be tugging at her, forcing her to replay those memories no matter how hard she tries to quash their upsurge. The air is charged and something in her brain tickles at her senses, her instinct, her foresight. The surroundings feel not-quite-right, like that day when she’d accompanied Astra to the forges and made that pitiful sculpture of the pelican.

Birds were so fascinating and foreign, and her father had once told her stories of great birds, of wingspans that spread the breadth of ships, the albatross, the gull, the ospry, and—in ages past—the counterparts to some serpents living beneath the seas:

_Dragons._

Try as she might under Astra’s guiding hand, the burning magma at the forges would not bend to her will. She had burned herself from mishandling the magma, the first injury ever sustained. And to top it all off, the pelican was less bird and more blob, but Zor-El said he loved it all the same. Kara, to this day, knows she could never get the wings right. Zor-El had placed it atop a shelf amongst other collected treasures and pointed it out to every merperson who swam into the Grotto of El in their homewaters.

Her sculpture was nothing like her mother’s tapestries, the collages pieced together with bone and pearl and scale and taut kelp strands, sun bleached or stained with octopus ink. Many other species called for those tapestries, those stories built with materials in such a verbal culture, nothing written, no scribes, the knowledge of the past imparted over generations with words repeated and memorized and carved onto the surfaces of their hearts. Alura was the first to externalize such tenants—the collages were as renowned as Astra’s deeds in battle, and they floated over the entire world.

Now, Kara can hardly remember her favorite story. She can hardly remember her mother’s voice.

Before she can grow too sentimental thinking over it, her phone rings.

“Alex?”

“Hey, Kara, where are you?”

“About an hour or so north of the city. Why? Do you need Supergirl?”

“Uhm… we… we need you, Kara. It’s not a Supergirl emergency, not really. But you need to come to the DEO. I just got here and… there’s someone you need to see.”

“Who is it?” Kara asks. “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”

“I found someone… well, she found me. We checked in but then there was someone else in the medbay and it got a little… you two are, well, it’s three of you, I—I mean, I’d really rather not have this conversation over the phone. How fast can you get here?”

“Southern current’s pretty strong, so maybe… quarter of an hour? I can skim the water and get there faster if—”

“No, don’t draw any attention to yourself,” Alex says, and Kara’s so unbelievably tired of that repetitious chorus. “Just… come by the lab when you get here, okay?”

“Sure,” Kara says, confused, a little tired, more than a little nostalgic. “Love you.”

“You, too. And Kara?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s… it’s a good thing, I think.”

“Okay…”

“It is,” Alex reassures her, and Kara can tell from the tonal uptick Alex isn’t lying. Or… at least she thinks Alex isn’t lying. Between Supergirl and the DEO, the past few months with Alex have been choppier than the waves left in the wake of a speedboat. “Listen, Kara, I think you’ll be happy.”

“I’ve had a pretty good day so far,” Kara responds, grinning at the full moon—the Oracle’s eye—looking down on her over the ocean. “I don’t know if it can get much better.”

“I think it can. See you in a while, Kara.”

“See you, Alex.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Kara checks the clock for the umpteenth time, jittering her bare foot against the concrete floor of Alex’s lab. She’s been sitting idly atop a twisty-stool for ten minutes with no sign of her marine biologist sister. Kara is not usually so anxious, but a cryptic summons from her covert-operative-sister does not bode well for mermaids in top-secret government headquarters.

“Where’s Agent Danvers?” Kara asks one of the agents prowling the halls of the seaside cliff facility. “She called about ten minutes ago and told me I needed to get down here.”

Kara waits while the agent presses against his earpiece and checks in with command.

“She was looking for the Director, and last I heard, he was going to check on a recent acquisition in the medbay.”

“Why would a hostile be taken to the medbay?” Kara questions aloud. The medbay is for injured operatives, not captured creatures. “Why not transport it to one of the retaining pools with the biologists?”

“I’m in R&D, ‘mam. It’s not my place to question policy.” The agent turns on his heel, holding a steaming bag of some sulfurous substance as far away from his body as possible. He pulls his goggles down and shoves two plugs up his nose, leaving a dripping stream of gross in his wake.

Kara shrugs and tiptoes around the sludge, tugging the top of the wet suit from her neck. As she turns the corner toward the medbay, she quickly unzips the neck of the stretchy red lycra for a little more breathing room. Her body suit isn’t grey or black like the agents’ suits are at the DEO. Instead hers is red, the sigil of her house emblazoned across the fabric covering her chest. It was strange when she first made landfall, learning of the humans’ peculiar sexualization of women’s breasts and torsos, but she’s come to adjust to it. Plus, it allowed what little remained of her culture to be prominently displayed whenever she made it above-the-fold in _The Tribune_. Whenever she saved a swimmer, or righted a capsized vessel, it was heartening to know that the crest was so easily recognizable, a symbol of hope when life’s undertow seemed relentless.

During her shift back to her natural form, her royal blue tail sparkled in the water and her blonde hair grew a shade darker from the dampness. She held her head higher when wearing the diadem, and her arms felt even stronger, more agile and powerful in their strokes with the bangles latched overtop her biceps. She was Supergirl—but she was also Kara, and it saddened her sometimes that so few people knew of the merge between the two, that those who looked up to her knew nothing of the binary, the dichotomy she struggled to maintain for their safety (and hers) every day.

“Alex?” Kara calls, the _swish_ of the wet suit fabric covering her legs the only sound in the darkness of the medbay. There’s a single light shining from the windows of the individual rooms circling the room-in-the-round, complete with various medical stations and beds rolled behind partitioned curtains. Inside the one occupied room, the shades are drawn, and the door is cracked to maintain some level of privacy. The lateness of the hour could explain the lack of lights, but Kara still finds it eerie being in the medbay alone so late at night. She really needs to get in touch with Alex and possibly get the heck back on the road. (Even Supergirl’s daring-dos don’t exempt Kara Danvers from work at a media empire in the morning, no matter how late Miss Grant kept her this evening with the failing Pacifica negotiations.)

“Alex?” Kara calls, approaching the open door.

“Supergirl? Supergirl, wait!”

Alex comes skidding around the corner, nearly sprinting toward Kara in her civilian clothes which was… not normal. Jeans. Dark grey t-shirt. Sneakers. Why wouldn’t Alex be in her standard black DEO gear? Why did she seem out of breath? Why was she here if she wasn’t on duty, and what made her call Kara in the first place?

“Alex, what’s going—Lieutenant Commander Lane,” Kara clears her throat and stands taller when she sees Lucy round the corner, no longer sporting the Naval dress of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. She’s the one wearing DEO black, not Alex, and looks disheveled, noticeably less put together than she normally does. Tired instead of determined, shaken instead of steady. Lucy doesn’t hold Kara’s— _Supergirl’s_ stare, as has been her custom over the few interactions she’s had with Kara in uniform.

“Agent Lane is working with us now,” Alex explains, and Kara’s stomach drops.

She feels crestfallen because Kara likes Lucy. She’s _friends_ with Lucy. And Lucy likes Kara, is close to her, revealed enough insecurities about moving out here in the first place to follow James… and then came clean to Kara first when she finally realized things with Cat’s newest prized photographer would only end in dissatisfaction for both parties involved. Kara had taken a several-sheets windward Lucy home after one too many at Noonan’s. And Lucy brought Kara her go-to coffee and half a dozen doughnuts (which Kara wolfed down and then went back for the other half dozen) as payment. Kara had invited Lucy to game night and they had kicked butt at Pictionary. Lucy had taken Kara to trivia at a bar with Winn and Kelly after one late night at Catco. They sent each other gifs of kittens hissing at ginormous dogs whenever Cat was in her office, verbally taking down men twice her size.

Kara and Lucy were close.

Kara and Lucy were _friends_.

But Lucy has never much liked Supergirl.

“Agent Lane,” Kara tries. “Glad to have you aboard.”

“Good to be here,” Lucy quips.

“Uh… weren’t you going to hit the bunkroom, Agent Lane?” Alex prompts Lucy, who’s been busy rubbing two fingers against her temple ever since she took her place beside Alex.

“Don’t you think we should check on them?”

“Susan’s been monitoring her progress,” Alex answers the newest DEO addition. “No change.”

“Who?” Kara asks, stopping herself from inquiring after Lucy’s apparent headache. Kara is concerned, but Supergirl can stand to act a little more removed. Although, Kara’s worry must be apparent, because Alex is giving her _that_ look.

Sometimes Kara wishes her sister wasn’t a secret agent. Wishes Alex couldn’t shoot her a grimace or a scowl that Kara’s learned to read effortlessly over years in close quarters, years growing up on land with a woman she never knew was a professional liar. Because right now Alex is giving her one of those telling expressions but Kara can’t quite place it—primarily because Lucy is watching them both like hawks despite her waning energies.

“Take three hours, Agent Lane. Get a REM cycle in or the Director will have some of the physical training staff haul you out the front door,” Alex advises.

Lucy shrugs and glances at Kara, her distaste for Supergirl even more evident when she’s tired. Kara wonders at that; what Supergirl ever did to Lucy, besides their tense standoff on the deck of the _Truxton_ when Hank had to take a crew down to the San Diego port and strong-arm Admiral Lane into handing over custody of a genetically engineered shark an independent oceanic firm had let loose in waters populated by civilian swimmers. Thankfully, the animal was detained before news of such a project could hit the press, but the DEO had already suffered from a load of institutional push-back after the _Sharknado_ franchise did (surprisingly) well. Turns out a disgruntled ex-DEO officer Hank had fired had retained enough access to the meteorological records and knew the limits of the NDAs issued after his discharge to sell his poorly plotted yet intriguing screen-play to the SyFy network. That parley in San Diego had taken place months before Kara had grown close with Lucy, and before Lucy could have invented any unsubstantiated grudges over Supergirl.

Shuffling closer toward the window, Lucy cranes her neck to get a look inside, but the blinds block her view. If only they were underwater, then Kara could look straight past the murkiness and into the room herself. Kara feels Alex watching her and notes her own position as bystander, more out-of-the-know that ever before. Who was in that _room_?

Lucy’s voice is scratchy as sand when she speaks, as if she’s not hydrated well enough on her first day: “She’s my case and I…I don’t know if I should leave her…”

“Like I said, no change,” Alex reiterates, her voice low, too, as if the onset of fatigue can no longer be stemmed by sheer determination. “If you’re that concerned, we’ll wake you when she regains consciousness.”

“She’s my case,” Lucy grumbles.

“No one’s taking that from you.”

“You’re the one who’s all about secrets, Agent Danvers. Don’t promise me something that isn’t true.”

Kara wonders how Lucy cottoned onto Alex’s MO so soon. Then again, Lucy was trained, and Kara wasn’t… She didn’t know what to look for, despite her exceptional status. It was back before Alex had come clean about the DEO, back when things like picking up on her sister’s secret life mattered. Kara knew herself well enough to recognize she was far too guileless to keep secrets like Alex. Alex, who came back to her boat with gauze wrapped round her arm, hastily discarded once Kara pointed out the bandages. _Blood drawn for mandatory blood test_ could only fly so often, and Kara had no idea what Alex’s reasoning could be for repeated lies. Lies that found her taped up from scrapes and punctures. Meanwhile, it’s Lucy’s first _day_ , and she’s already calling Alex out.

“Lucy, she’s not alone,” Alex reassures her. “I called Supergirl here for a reason. Once we give her a check up, we’re going to find—”

“It sucks to wake up alone in a hospital bed,” Lucy interrupts, and it’s just informal and raw enough that Kara wonders if the junior Lane is speaking from experience.

“Lucy, go on. Supergirl or I will update you if anything changes,” Alex mutters, unable to ease Lucy’s unyielding solicitude for her charge.

Lucy shrugs, crossing her arms over her chest. “Well, when she does wake up, tell Alura I won’t be far.”

Kara wonders how she remains standing, surprised that her own neck doesn’t snap with the force she uses to whip her head in Lucy’s direction. Kara wonders how she remains standing, because she hasn’t heard that name on any one else’s lips in _years._ Kara wonders how she remains standing, because she has not once associated her mother with the land, a medbay, the DEO.

“Who?” Kara asks. She had to have heard it wrong. That name, maybe something to do with Alex’s boat, surely it couldn’t be… “Lu—Agent Lane,” Kara says, her throat constricting, her chest imploding, her eyes burning and her blood freezing and all of her anatomy revolting, simultaneous attacks against her nervous system issued with three syllables rolling over her friend’s parched tongue: “You said… Alura?”

“I found her on the beach this—”

Kara doesn’t wait for Lucy to finish, barging into the door of the private room and darting toward the bed.

“Mother—moth—Aunt Astra?!” Kara gasps, bringing both hands up over her mouth. She bites her lips, unable to staunch the flow of hot, stinging tears mercilessly surging up from within a part of her she had thought long buried and lost.

Astra picks her head up from the hospital bedside and blinks, rousing herself from an unfocused doze. But her mouth wobbles when she locks eyes with Kara and her gaze drifts down to Kara’s chest, lingering momentarily on the Crest of El. Kara watches the haze of tears form for Astra as well but then, her aunt _smiles._

“Kara,” Astra rasps, extending her arm, grabbing at the air as Kara sails over toward her, crying openly now. Choked, short noises that don’t have time to grow into anything substantial trip over her vocal chords like sound effects dusted off of a recording from an old radio play. She sounds like a tree frog croaking out a song but Kara can’t care, not when her family is within reaching distance. She takes her aunt’s hand and squeezes, collapses to her knees, the feeling of her aunt’s skin, the sight of her mother’s still body far more crippling than any hit she’s ever taken from the spine-shattering lashing of a serpent’s tail.

“Kara, it’s—alright, I—Kara—” Astra can’t catch her breath either, the hiccups accompanying the tears something Kara’s gotten used to over her years, but the sensation of lost oxygen when sobbing is no doubt unfamiliar and panic-inducing for a merwoman who is more used to filtering oxygen through gills, not the lungs of a human respiratory system.

“It’s… it’s okay,” Kara tells her, grabbing for her mother’s cold hand, wiping Astra’s tears away with her opposite thumb. “Alex!” Kara shouts, heedless of the hour, all thoughts of Lucy and the DEO and CatCo drowned under this joy, this confusion, this feeling of her world upturned and rearranged so that she no longer knows the difference between present and wonderful, tempting memory.

“Breathe, Astra, you have to breathe—”

“For-forgive m-me,” Astra gasps. Kara watches her shoulders rise in quick, sporadic bursts until a pair of hands curls overtop them, pressing them down.

“Astra, breathe with Kara,” Alex advises from above, standing over Kara’s hyperventilating aunt and attempting to talk them both back to reality.

“In on a four count,” Kara hears from behind, and Lucy has slunk into the hospital room and taken the other free waiting chair near the door, her elbows propped on her knees, her face turned down towards the floor tiles. “Alura had trouble breathing when she woke up, too.”

“It’s—“ Astra keeps gasping, sucking in air and then barely pushing any out. “It’s, it’s the—”

“Astra, stop talking,” Alex says. “Focus on your breathing patterns. I know it’s an adjustment after a surprise, but if you don’t slow down you might pass out.”

“Is my mother alive?” Kara asks, for as caught up as she is in her stricken aunt, her weary friend, her level-headed sister, Kara’s not heard one peep of her mother’s condition.

Her _mother_.

The mother Kara had all but given up on after raising her hopes sky-high year after agonizing year. On the anniversary of Kara’s escape to the shore, she’d camp out on the beach where she’d been found with Jeremiah and Alex and then, after the vessel capsized in the Amazon River, just with Alex. And every year Kara would return to the water on that one day, would swim the inlet and the three mile stretch from pier to pier, scouting for her mother. And every year there would be no sign of Alura’s blue tail, of the scales that flickered like gemstones set in beautiful bands, in torcs, in the bangles Kara donned over her arms when in her Supergirl attire. But there Alura rests, eyes closed, her chest rising and falling in an easy rhythm Astra only just now seems to mimic, thanks to Alex’s steady pressure on her shoulders, thanks to Kara’s clinging proximity by her knees.

“She’s alive. Unconscious, recovering from a serious stab wound to the lower abdomen. She’s been out of a very intensive surgery for just over six hours. She woke up about five hours out and there was an… incident,” Alex says, cutting her eyes toward the back of Astra’s head. Her summary is far less detailed than Kara would’ve liked, but Alex never leaves out pertinent information. “Your mother is stable, Kara. They got her in the operating room in time and got her patched up… well… her human anatomy, anyway.”

“Why didn’t…” Kara looks to Astra who has calmed, her chest no longer heaving, her hands no longer shaking, her gaze, once manic and desperate, trained steadily on Kara’s face, cataloging every feature she never got to see develop.

“Aunt Astra, why hasn’t she healed yet?”

“Oh, Little One,” Astra says, brushing at the damp strands of hair curtaining Kara’s face away from the outside world. She looks up into green eyes and sees her mother, but it’s not her mother; just from the pinched, high brow and the stubborn clench at the jaw Kara knows the merwoman looking down at her is none other than her proud, resilient aunt. “Alura’s diadem is… lost.”

“Lost?”

“Taken.”

Lucy again, from behind, still with her face downturned, her gaze boring into the floor. “Stolen, probably. Alura’s suffering from memory loss, but Vasquez says there’s no sign of a head injury. Just the stab wound. Apparently, your people can be made to do things. Even made to forget.”

“Why would someone—” No. Kara shakes her head. Wrong place to start. The reasons for taking a diadem are many, but that is not the most pressing question of the evening. Kara can hardly get any query out because she is plagued by so _many_ : who stabbed her mother? Who found her? How does Alex know Astra? How is Astra _here_? What happened to the prison? What of the tribe? Why did Alura come only when she was injured? Why did she wait so long? Why couldn’t Kara have remained for another year, or two…

_Why didn’t she come for_ _me?_

Kara wipes her tears on the exposed skin on her shoulder, sniffling into her arm. “How are you here, Aunt Astra?”

“I came looking for you,” Astra answers. “The oceans… they pulled me back to you, Kara. They led me to the boat, to your sister.”

Kara smiles and tastes her tears, tastes the ocean, tastes home and the cracked remnants of family. Alex is standing warily behind Astra, but it’s good to have her here, good to know that the Oracle recognizes Alex as Kara’s family. A small family, broken, shattered by circumstance, but maybe… maybe something that can be sewn back together? Just like Alura’s tapestries.

“Astra,” Kara begins, releasing her mother’s hand, turning to clutch against her aunt’s knees. It’s an awkward position, but she wants a hug so desperately she’ll settle for clinging to extremities she’s never seen on her aunt before. “I… I have so many questions.”

“Sorry to interrupt a family reunion,” Director Henshaw stomps into the tight recovery room, looking soggier than usual. “But we’ve got a situation down at the docks. Supergirl?”

Kara has never wanted to be in the ocean less, not if her family is on land.

“Can… can it wait?” Kara asks.

Why _now_? Why, when the day goes from decent to miraculous, does something from the pressurized depths see fit to come and ruin whatever precious moments she can finally share with her family?

“I’ll go,” Alex says, leaving Kara and Astra by Alura’s bedside.

“Me, too,” Lucy answers, pushing off of her knees. “I need some air. Or water. Just… to not be here for a minute.”

“Neither one of you are fit for going out with the strike teams,” Hank holds up an open hand. “Especially up against a Hydra.”

“The Hydra?” Astra asks, standing at once, the glimmer of tears replaced with a fierce shine that Kara had admired since she was little more than a tadpole, seeing Astra off to her battles in foreign waters. “That is impossible. Or…”

“Not so impossible?” Alex finishes for her, placing her hands on her hips as she turns back to Astra. “If this has to do with the glaciers… this is what you were talking about earlier?”

Kara climbs to her feet, her eyes ping-ponging between her aunt and her sister. “Earlier? Alex, how long have you had them here?”

“I just came in with Astra an hour ago,” Alex answers, rubbing a hand over her face. Kara can note the first signs of her sister’s fatigue, and recalls that she was supposed to head out with James to the reef for the day. Knowing Alex, she probably got an early start. “I called you as soon as I could get Astra to come in, I didn’t know about your mother,” Alex continues. “Lucy found Alura this morning.”

“You found them… separately?”

“Supergirl, I need to know if you’re going to be on the scene,” J’onn interrupts again. “There won’t be much of Limetown Bay left if this thing does what it’s rumored to do.”

“J’onn, you’ve got to let me go,” Alex presses, nodding back at Kara. “That’s my boat… it’s… it’s my father.”

“Did you say Limetown Bay?” Kara asks, her heart thundering even harder than it had the moment she realized her family was still alive.

It’s all so much—Astra, Alex, Lucy, her _mother_ , all of them cooped up in this tiny recovery room with soft beeping and dim lights and enough emotional trauma between the lot of them to keep a therapist busy for months on end.

“It’s on a projected course to the harbor,” J’onn reports. “Team at Command’s got it on the radar and it’s coming in at almost a hundred knots. The wave behind it will do some serious damage.”

“That’s Limetown Docks,” Kara mutters, her mind spiraling out of control. Mother. Ocean. Astra. Hydra…

_Cat_.

“I’ve got to go…” Kara says, jerking toward the door. “I’ll need…”

“Strike teams will be there for backup,” J’onn tells her, snapping at a subordinate in the hallway. “Prep two motorboats for a Class-D water strike. ETA at Limetown Bay should be less than twenty minutes.”

“Yes sir!” the agent scurries off, taking a left out of the medbay and jogging back to command.

“Okay,” Kara huffs, turning back to Alura’s bed. “Okay I… but I’m coming back—”

“I’m going with you,” Astra says, placing a hand on Kara’s shoulder.

“Astra, no, let us handle this,” Alex objects. “You’re not affiliated with us. We can’t let you—”

“Let? I am no asking for your permission, Alexandra Danvers,” Astra snips back. “You know nothing of this creature. Not like I do. It took an entire guard of trained merwarriors to defeat Hesiod’s Hydra, and your people cannot even do battle beneath the surface.”

“You underestimate our abilities,” J’onn tells Astra.

“I’ve overestimated your benevolence once before, but never how capable you are,” Astra sneers. “It is these _humans_ who have little to contribute—”

“That’s not true,” Alex objects.

“You are not at your sharpest, and Agent Lane looks as if she would sink the moment she touches the water. Spare me your aid,” Astra argues. “This is not like before when you had my diadem. You have no power over me here.”

“Wait,” Kara stops her aunt, turning to the congregation of agents and mercreatures at the door to Alura’s room. “How did Alex have your crown?”

“You know what? Let’s deal with the Hydra first,” Alex grimaces as her face flushes pink. “I won’t go out with the strike teams, but you can’t stop me from going on board my own ship.”

“Fine,” J’onn says. “And try to keep tabs on our other merwoman,” Kara hears J’onn mutter, engaging in some tense stare-down with Astra. “I don’t want to be thrown back against a wall again.”

Kara doesn’t have the time to mull over that comment. She feels pulled in twenty different directions, like when she fought that suped-up octo-deca-hectadeca-pus with the extra tentacles, all her limbs contorted and tugged to creaking, reminiscent of some hideous torture on the rack from more barbaric human days.

“I’m coming, I’m… let me have a moment with her?” Kara says, feeling the urge to get to Cat, to swim, to move as fast as possible, but she can’t leave her mother without _something_.

Astra, J’onn, and Alex all duck out of the room, and Kara can hear the echo of their footfalls as the leave the medbay. How did Alex come across her aunt? How had she overpowered her? And what of the glaciers?

“Mother,” Kara says, approaching the bed quickly, skimming the surface of the floor as quickly as she does the surface of the waves. She dips to place a kiss against Alura’s forehead. “We’re coming back for you. I won’t leave you—”

_Like you left me_.

Kara closes her eyes and a final tear escapes, hating that she was even able to complete the thought.

“Kara?”

_Oh. Lucy_.

In the rush, she had forgotten her frenemy, posted up behind the chair by the entrance to the hospital room, the corners of her lips downturned. Kara turns quickly to confront her, the damp strands of her hair hitting her neck with a sopping _plop_.

“Lucy,” Kara murmurs, feeling guilty and relieved and terrified and so many other things. Too much. Drowning on dry land. Pressure and attacks and family and gratitude and—“Thank you for saving her.”

“She’s your mother,” Lucy says, glancing between Kara and the bedside.

“Yes.”

“And you’re Supergirl… obviously,” Lucy mutters, stepping closer to Kara, keeping a lid on the urgency of the moment, the betrayal she must be feeling. “Figures.”

“Lucy, I… I can explain…”

“Not necessary,” Lucy answers. “Get to the bay. You’re needed elsewhere. I’ll stay with her until she wakes.”

“Lucy—”

“Go, Kara.”

Kara starts to walk away then pauses, turning back and taking Lucy into her arms and hugging her tightly. “I really am sorry I didn’t tell you. You’re my friend and I… I had to lie because… my mother, you… thank you.”

Kara releases her and doesn’t look back, unable to think over her non-explanation. She zips through the hallways as fast as her limbs will carry her, forgoing the elevator to the pools in the caverns below and instead heading up, climbing the ladder to the manhole that opens up to the gated compound at the top of the cliff. There’s no fencing, because no one’s as crazy or manic as she is, no one’s ever been desperate enough to get to the water so he or she can swim back to town. Kara doesn’t know where Alex or J’onn or Astra has gone, but she can bet she’ll meet up with them all the same.

Astra, here, ready to fight with her.

Her mother, in the hospital bed, found beachside by her best friend, who now knows her secret identity.

Alex, trying to keep a tentative lid on the panic boiling over, dealing with a new agent who knows far too much and a sister reunited with a people she thought long dead.

Cat, in danger, having left the safety of the harbor at the club for that disastrous meeting with the men from Pacifica, after she had alleviated any remaining doubts concerning Kara’s position at the company.

It’s all so _much_ , all at once, and Kara doesn’t know if she has the strength to shoulder it all.

Kara bursts through the manhole and takes off toward the edge of the cliff, running, leaping, diving, and then falling into the one place that seems to relieve so much of the pressure she has to deal with. She tucks her chin against her neck and once her hands break the flat surface of the water, she feels her powers surge, buoyed up by the strength of the ocean. Suddenly, her family doesn’t seem so lost. Cat’s situation at the bay doesn’t seem so perilous. And her relationships with her sister and her friend can be remedied and mended, washed clean by the magic of the ocean.

She’s Supergirl. She can handle anything.

Because the water makes her strong.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Perhaps the water doesn’t make her _that_ strong.

“Where is your weapon?” Astra asks, bobbing above the surface in the middle of the mouth of the bay.

Kara had swum with all of her might to get to the waters in time, thankful for her speed despite managing to outstrip the two strike teams motoring up the coast in their inflatable FC 580s. The teams of black-clad DEO agents were all geared up and ready for the amphibious assault. Judging from their speed and the windage, Kara wagers they’ll arrive at the bay in under fifteen minutes.

“Weapon?” Kara asks her aunt.

“Your spear?” Astra turns to her, the white strip of her hair stark as bone in the moonlight. “Knife? Trident?”

“I don’t use a weapon,” Kara answers. “I’m Supergirl.”

“You are foolish, _Supergirl_ , if you plan to stop a Hydra with nothing more than your tail and your wits,” Astra reprimands her, but there is little hostility to it. Just a knowing sort of haughtiness derived from years of battle experience. Competing emotions plague her: astonishment, inferiority, a smidgen of anger.

“We’ve not even had a proper reunion and you’re already chastising me?” Kara asks her.

“I will not see any harm come to you from your own carelessness!” Astra yells at her over the sound of waves crashing on shore, the surf churning with greater might, a prelude to the oncoming tsunami the Hydra will cause. The glow of Astra’s eyes under the Oracle’s light burns so brightly it is as if stars have fallen and fused themselves into Astra’s skull. That voice, fierce and uncompromising, had never been directed toward Kara in her youth, but Astra did not rise to the rank of Praetor with soft, reassuring tones. “I will not lose you again, Kara.”

“Then teach me,” Kara tells her, looking out at the massive series of waves creeping toward them in the night. Back in the water, her enhanced sight has activated, and she dips beneath the surface to spot a massive creature, large enough to dwarf an aircraft carrier, large enough to set the waves pounding against the docks and to capsize the boats nestled within the slips with a single _slap_ against the water with its massive, giraffe-like neck (or… _one_ of its necks).

“I trust you’ve not forgotten the stories of the Hydra species?” Astra yells at her.

“No head slicing,” Kara gulps, having never faced a situation quite this bleak.

The many-headed dragon is almost as large as a Naval torpedo boat, and the wave it produces from its movements through the ocean seems just as massive.

“We have to stop the waves,” Kara says.

“We have to stop the creature,” Astra argues.

“There’s too much property behind us to let that wall of water take down the buildings and the boats. Circumvent the wave and draw the Hydra to a stretch of beach that’s unpopulated. We can’t fight with civilians around.”

Astra turns over her shoulder. Glances. Huffs. Probably weighs the pros and cons of argument in a split second like the strategist she is. Her dissent is evident even if it is not voiced, and Kara remembers that Astra has no obligation to humans. Property damage is not her primary concern.

“Fine. You freeze the wave and I’ll burn the creature,” Astra amends. “Though a minor inconvenience like my sight might not be enough for it to chase me—”

“Uhm, Aunt Astra?”

“What, Kara?”

“I‘ve been working on it but I haven’t… exactly… mastered the freeze breath thing yet. Not to this scale, anyway.”

“You haven’t… Kara, has anyone _trained_ you?!”

“The DEO has—”

“Training from the humans is useless! I think… maybe you should go back—”

“No, I’m Supergirl, I can handle this,” Kara objects, tenses, but nevertheless feels insufficient. “You freeze the wave, I’ll draw it south to Paley’s Cove. There’s no beaches there, and the highway is at least three miles off the coast because of the rocks.”

Astra regards her, the pointed tips of the woman’s trident— _where did she even get that?_ —poking out from the surface of the water. Kara wonders how much of her speech Astra understood, and wonders if she takes more issue with being directed by her untrained niece, or if her hesitation comes from Kara offering herself up as bait.

“You swim fast?” Astra asks.

“Some say faster than you in the current hurdles,” Kara answers, half a grin pulling at the edges of her lips. That’s a lie, though. No one knows about the current hurdles save Kara herself. She just likes to think she's as quick as her aunt.

The wave looms two hundred yards out, a solid wall of water rising fifty feet in the air. The waves are cresting, white foam churning at the tops as the water rolls over itself into a tumbling slide of destructive force.

“Very well,” Astra tells her, shutting her eyes and diving beneath the surf.

Sirens blare behind her and rotating emergency lights flash. A bullhorn issuing an evacuation directive from the main office. Probably a tip-off from the DEO.

The wave towers over the largest boat at the dock, one-hundred fifty, one-twenty-five, one hundred yards out. It’s fast. The monster. The wave. Kara can do this. She can _do_ this.

Footfalls. Kara hears them. Rubber on wooden planks. Shouting. A rush, a splash, a scream echoing back against a wall of water defying gravity’s principles and hurtling toward people in boats. A motor, a crank. The whisper of material unfurled, sails, rigging tugged and tied.

And then the comforting coolness emerges.

Frost.

Blankets of it, like snowflakes shaved from the treetops of a mountain range.

Ice. A wall of ice as large as the ones in Antarctica, grown large and sturdy before her, rising from the depths of the ocean. Curved, or trapezoidal, or—geometry is unimportant, she’s supposed to be drawing the creature _away_ , giving Astra some cover, helping before the next wave...

_Smacks!_

Oh no.

Ice, solution and problem. For when ice floes crumble and massive chunks fall into the waters below, they displace water at rest and set off more waves, smaller than a tsunami, but still large enough to deconstruct a pier, to savagely upturn a boat.

Boats. Yachts. The vessels.

Alex’s sails to the south, following the curvature of the ice flow. Temperature dipping, the California waters now littered with huge chunks of frozen ocean water. Unprecedented. Anomaly. Treacherous obstacles. Boats rise so high on the waves engulfing the piers that they crash, slamming back down against the wooden planks to splinter hulls and boards alike.

Screams. Louder behind her. Move, dive, swim, twist, duck, faster, quicker, safer, get-them-to-safety—

“Kara, the beast!”

Astra: her shouts through the water, the cooler water, the ice floes stacked one behind the other to keep the series of waves from doing unparalleled damage—

The beast. Distraction. Kara concentrates, and her eyes burn with a fury she’s not unleashed in ages, the fury of an abandoned child left without her family, held back from her entire _world_.

Once a year. Once a year was she allowed to go back to the waters, unless she had the uncommon fortune to go sailing with Jeremiah.

_It’s too dangerous._

_Someone might see._

_What about the radars, Kara?_

Put your crown on a shelf a be human, be normal, be good, be brave, be-be-be-be-

Burn.

Her crying rage fades into the water as she burns the hide of the beast’s chest with the beams from her eyes, feeling as though she might drain herself from the effort. She stalls the assault and the Hydra turns, cracking through the first layer of ice and rerouting south, following the wake of Alex’s boat, right toward the strike team’s path.

Away from the civilians.

Kara surfaces, her neck tingling, the fins of the beast breaking against the tops of the water, the first wall of ice standing tall as some of the buildings in National City. It creeks, it groans, leans, topples—

Kara churns the water with her tail, diving deep and blasting out of the surface to hover over the ocean, the geyser beneath her only able to hold the wall up for so long. She grits her teeth together and presses back against the block of ice, hoping Astra has seen her situation, hoping Astra has distracted the beast long enough for Kara to right the first barricade and keep it from slamming into the piers.

“Aaaaarghh!” she yells from the strain and sets the ice back upright, but with enough force that bits of the edges begin to crumble. Huge blocks breaking off the main piece, one large spike driving down into the water twenty yards to her north. A block, large as a midlevel house in the suburbs, sails off the tiptop of the ice block and drops thirty feet into the water, hitting the largest boat in the bay, the boat docked farthest from the shore because it’s still a civilian port, nothing for huge, expensive private _yachts_.

Yachts like the one she was one that afternoon. Yachts owned by people who work at companies like CatCo, like Pacifica.

_Please have gone home, please be tucked away in bed, Carter in the next room, please be up drinking a scotch and bitching about the good ole’ boys club from Pacifica and their transparent power move, forcing her to come to them on this floating version of a phallic symbol—_

Ice crashes and the massive yacht dips into the trough of a massive wave, the keel of the boat rolling, the top-heavy vessel not meant for deep sea travel upending against the wave. The ice steadies under her grip but she can’t stop the broken pieces; she dives into the churning waters near the overturned boat. It’s murky, dark, cold, perfect conditions for a mermaid, less so for a human. Two heart beats to her left, one man in a business suit she recognizes from earlier, another that looks like a crew member. She grabs and drags, surfacing instantly, the two men sputtering against the surface of the part of the dock that remains in tact.

“How many aboard?” she shouts.

“T—three more,” the crew member. “Or… maybe two? The first mate tried to take the lady to the docks but she wanted pictures—”

_Dammit, Cat_.

“And the captain. The executives deboarded at the first sirens.”

Back to the water.

Coolness.

Her tail propelling her forward, the boat flipped upside down but not sunk, just dislodged. They’ll be picking up broken driftwood from now until next season. The heart beat. The glint of gold round a wrist. Bracelet. Blonde hair.

_Cat_.

Kara bolts toward Cat’s limp body, feels the ocean water mixed with the oily feel of slime at her forehead. Kara places her arms beneath Cat’s armpits and shoots upward, tugging her as carefully as she can all the way back to the beach, back to the sand, out of the way of any solid objects that could crash against her and do her more damage like—oh, oh no—the gash at her head, bleeding, red everywhere, red as Kara’s suit—

“Miss Grant!”

Kara pats at her face, curses her for getting the newest release of the iPhone early, just because “ _It’s waterproof Kiera, and I’m planning on being at the ocean for the summer. What if Supergirl shows up and James is on assignment elsewhere? Someone needs to snap a photo, even if it’s on a subpar camera_.”

“No… come on, come _on_!”

Kara tilts Cat’s head up and pinches her nostrils closed, opens her mouth and covers Cat’s with her own, delivering two deep, powerful breaths. She presses against Cat’s chest, careful to regulate her strength. She doesn’t count, can’t count, just knows the rhythm she’s supposed to press to keep her heart pumping oxygen, keep her brain from getting water-logged, keep Cat Grant in this world just a little while longer because Kara might be Supergirl but she also _needs_ her.

“Cat please, come on, please don’t—”

Kara moves away from her chest and goes back toward her head, pinching her nose and delivering two more puffs. She returns to Cat’s chest and pumps, pushes, forces the water out of her.

Convulsions, a lurch, and then regurgitation of salt water, Cat Grant rolling to her side in her soaked Prada suit with one strappy heel still attached to her foot, gagging up water on the sand as blood runs down over her head.

“Miss Grant?” Kara asks, patting her on the back gently. “Miss Grant, it’s alright. I have to go, but you need to get off the shore.”

Sirens in the distance. The far distance. Kara wonders if Cat can hear them yet.

“Super… Supergirl…”

“I have to go. I’m sorry, Miss Grant,” Kara says, sweeping the wet hair from Cat’s shaken face, cradling her cheek in hand for one self-indulgent, blissful moment.

“Thank you,” Cat tells her, her chest heaving as Astra’s had mere minutes ago, when Kara was miles and lifetimes away at the DEO.

Kara nods, straightens, then throws herself back into the waters, ready to chase down a beast she hopes hasn’t killed anyone yet.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Cat watches the merwoman skip across the foam and dive back into the water, heading south, her ripples splashing against the huge masses of ice she’ll have the first shots of for the nightly news segments.

She gasps, shivering despite the warm evening temperatures, vision fogged up like the windshield of her LandRover she only uses to get around the resort in Aspen. But her surroundings shine more like the colors on the beach in Bermuda, not white-washed, snow-capped Aspen. Bulbs overhead. Golden. Burnished. Reflecting mustard hues off those ice packs like an overused sepia filter. But it’s a comforting glow, safe, the same flickering light that reflects from the circlet atop Supergirl’s head while she’s in action—that light, the halo of it, surrounds Cat.

She can hear the workers from the front office tromping onto the pier and down the steps, heading for her on the sand, can just make out the squeals from the sirens of the first responders, spots the bodies of the Pacifica reps dragged atop the wooden planks fifty yards away. Cat raises her trembling fingers to her mouth, and that sensation, those lips, that mouth… she came all the way out here to forget the feeling, but now, she’s tasted it again.

“Kara…”

 

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. Y'all. I'm like... real sorry about how long it took to update. See I just got a new job that I'm so grateful to have, i'm just spread a little thin adjusting this month. I'm gonna do better, because I always feel good when I write, and frankly, I miss it. I gave myself a deadline to have this out by the time the weekend was finished and i'm 90 minutes ahead of schedule so... yay? 
> 
> Anyway, I loved the first ep, all except the (overt) hints that Cat's going off to do *something*. But I'll board the Supergal/Lena train (what's their name gonna be i know yall are probz already on it) because wow. The helicopter and the interviewing scene was tops. 
> 
> Anyway, if anyone's still aboard for this particular ride, I'd love to hear from you. Sorry for the typos and weird foray into past tense, I just really wanted to get the chapter out this weekend. Thanks so much for reading my mumbo jumbo!!!

**Author's Note:**

> there goes my next six to eight months here we go again y'all 
> 
> And if some material sounded familiar, Cat Grant's reminiscing of the dying whale pod is loosely based on Marina Keegan's story. I really liked her essay collection.


End file.
